I’m enjoying the Jewish hysteria.<\/p>\n
James “two-time winner of a National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association Award!” Kirchick writes<\/a>: I find Trump\u2019s contempt for the basic functions of democracy\u2014in particular the First Amendment to the United States Constitution\u2014absolutely appalling. His call to ban all Muslims from entering the country is fundamentally evil. Naturally, Trump has also said<\/a> he\u2019s unsure whether President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was wrong, despite official condemnations by later American presidents. The casually dispensed threats to those who might challenge his authority as president, from the Speaker of the House (\u201che\u2019s going to have to pay a big price<\/a>\u201d) to military officers who refuse his hypothetical illegal orders mandating commission of torture and war crimes (\u201cThey\u2019re not gonna refuse me\u201d), has literally kept me awake at night with visions of the country gradually transforming into a North American caudillo<\/em>-stan. If a recent Washington Post<\/em> article<\/a> about therapists reporting an outbreak of \u201cTrump anxiety\u201d among their patients is any indication, I am hardly the only Jew dealing with such existential worry.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Nuremberg-esque rallies, where entranced audiences obliviously raise their right hands in impromptu loyalty oaths, evince a frisson<\/em> of seething aggression. One has come to expect that black and Latino protesters, not to mention fellow journalists, will be roughed up, behavior Trump has repeatedly and explicitly endorsed. His call for deporting 11 million illegal immigrants raises the prospect of nationwide nighttime raids and are the harbinger of a police state. His unapologetic mockery of the physically disabled\u2014one of the Nazis\u2019 earliest victims\u2014resembles a CliffsNotes\u2019 Nietzchean will to power. If Trump doesn\u2019t get his way at the Republican National Convention this summer, that he will deploy some sort of organized paramilitary force\u2014transforming Cleveland into a far-right phantasmagoria of Chicago 1968\u2014is hardly idle speculation.<\/p>\n Watching the Trump drama unfold, I have felt a sense of being transported back to my earlier posting abroad as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty, in which capacity I covered upheaval across the former Soviet space and North Africa. This is the sort of candidate and the type of politics we associate with failed states and military dictatorships, not the world\u2019s oldest constitutional democracy. If Trump wins the nomination and, God forbid, the presidency, I anticipate race riots in major American cities. Philip Roth\u2019s alternate history novel, The Plot Against America<\/em>, envisioning the narrow election of a President Charles Lindbergh who keeps America out of World War II and presides over a worsening climate of anti-Jewish persecution, is no longer the stuff of my Bubbie\u2019s tsuris<\/em>. These biographical details, meant to reassure Jews who may be on the fence about the billionaire, are cold comfort. From the cult of masculinity to the boastful anti-intellectualism, Donald Trump has unleashed ugly passions that any Jew with even the most tenuous connection to Jewish community, history, or tradition ought instinctively fear. Nativism, racism, populism, physical and rhetorical thuggery, blatant lying\u2014these are things that should disturb all people of good will. But they are anathema especially to the Jewish \u201ccritical spirit,\u201d that rich tradition of skepticism and humanism loathed by know-nothing anti-Semites throughout history. To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.<\/p>\n More disheartening than any of Trump\u2019s individual policy pronouncements and behaviors is the fact that so many Americans are unbothered by them. According<\/a> to political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, Trump supporters have an \u201cauthoritarian\u201d disposition. They admire strength to the exclusion of any other characteristic including decency, consistency, and compassion, never mind respect for the rule of law. This trait has long eluded political pollsters because, like me, they didn\u2019t think that a predisposition toward authoritarianism was a characteristic worth measuring in the American electorate. That it so clearly is does not bode well for the future of our republic.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n If Trump has brought out the worst in the American right, so has he elicited the worst from a segment of the American left. To their everlasting credit, many conservative intellectuals have forthrightly denounced Trumpism, providing a moral example for the many spineless Republican elected officials (with the heroic exception<\/a> of Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse) who have shamefully chosen to stand on the sidelines as their party moves closer and closer to nominating an authoritarian demagogue as its presidential nominee. This elite-level repudiation was most clearly expressed in \u201cAgainst Trump<\/a>,\u201d a cover story symposium published by National Review<\/em>, and an open letter lambasting<\/a> the Republican front-runner signed by over 100 prominent GOP foreign policy and national security experts, many of them friends and colleagues and whose views I enthusiastically endorse. Both initiatives placed country over party, stressing the threat that Trump poses not merely to conservative values and the future viability of the GOP, but more importantly the fundamental tenets of America\u2019s democracy and global standing.<\/p>\n To a certain species of left-wing pundit, however, these patently good faith sentiments are the result of darker, malign motivations. What really angers the conservative establishment, these commentators believe, is Trump\u2019s refusal to bow before the \u201cneoconservatives,\u201d a political classification often indistinguishable from \u201cJewish foreign policy hawk.\u201d MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews\u2014who in a tirade last year attacked<\/a> \u201cpiggish money people,\u201d \u201ca rotten crowd out there that is very hawkish,\u201d and \u201cwants to fight more wars\u201d\u2014believes that Trump\u2019s condemnation of Operation Iraqi Freedom is what turned the \u201cwar hawks\u201d against him. Never mind that Trump\u2019s supposed heresy of GOP foreign policy dogma is as muddled and inconsistent as his views on any other matter, and reeks of opportunism. After National Review <\/em>published its symposium, Matthews invited the magazine\u2019s Washington editor Eliana Johnson onto his television program. There, the Father Coughlin of MSNBC demanded<\/a> Johnson admit that Trump\u2019s latter-day opposition to Iraq was the reason her magazine so strenuously opposed his candidacy. Matthews, who after the network fired Pat Buchanan ably assumed its designated slot for blowhard tribune of the lace-curtain Catholic, insisted of the contributors that \u201cregime change is in their bloodstream\u201d and that \u201cevery name on that list supported the Iraq War.\u201d Not only is the latter claim demonstrably false; the word \u201cIraq\u201d does not appear once in any of the 22 separate contributions.<\/p>\n Writing for Glenn Greenwald\u2019s The Intercept<\/em>, Zaid Jilani, last seen losing his job at a liberal think tank for calling various American politicians \u201cIsrael-firsters,\u201d says<\/a> Trump is \u201csetting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades.\u201d Professional neocon watchers Ali Gharib and Jim Lobe, meanwhile, predict<\/a>, \u201cThere\u2019s little doubt that the neocons and their allies will, sooner or later, call for another Big War in the Middle East, and when they do, it seems President Trump will be wholly unresponsive.\u201d<\/p>\n In the National Interest<\/em>, Jacob Heilbrunn singled out<\/a> Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan, who has written<\/a> two, bracing<\/a> Washington Post<\/em> op-eds denouncing Trump and declared his support for Hillary Clinton should Trump become the Republican nominee. \u201cKagan is an eloquent writer, but he elides the fact that many of Trump\u2019s positions are not all that different from what the GOP has espoused in the past when it comes to domestic issues. It is on foreign affairs where Trump represents a marked shift and it is this that truly troubles the neocon wing,\u201d Heilbrunn declares. Because the liberal media\u2019s obsession with supposed neocon machinations is endless, the New York Times<\/em> gave Heilbrunn an opportunity to repeat<\/a> his case last week, arguing that neocons are \u201cinterlopers\u201d terrified at the prospect of Trump\u2019s rise bringing about an end to their iron grip over American foreign policy.<\/p>\n I have a simpler, not to mention more charitable, explanation for why so many Jewish conservatives\u2014er, \u201cneocons\u201d\u2014viscerally oppose Trump: He\u2019s a fascist demagogue.<\/p>\n Heilbrunn, of all people, should understand. He wrote an entire book<\/a> in which he quite properly identified memory of the Holocaust and a resultant heightened sensitivity to totalitarianism as crucial factors in shaping neoconservatism, the centerpiece of which was fervent, moralistic opposition to communism. Is it not more likely that it\u2019s the aforementioned, objectively disturbing aspects of Trumpism\u2014and not an absence of warmongering blood lust, which Trump actually displays far more than the neocons\u2014that most disturbs Jewish hawks?<\/p>\n Undeniably, neoconservatives have much to loathe in Trump\u2019s putative foreign policy. Praising Vladimir Putin as a \u201cstrong leader,\u201d commending the Chinese communists for their \u201cstrength\u201d in massacring thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, attacking free trade, slandering our close allies as freeloaders, promising to unwind the postwar international liberal world order that America constructed and has maintained for seven decades, and, yes, promising to be \u201cneutral\u201d on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict\u2014all of these positions are ones that neoconservatives oppose.<\/p>\n But they are also positions that most Americans<\/em>, never mind conservatives, oppose, and for good reason. \u201cThe neocons are right that a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign policy debacle,\u201d Heilbrunn concedes, before divining the real <\/em>reasons neocons<\/a> loathe Trump. Not surprisingly, Heilbrunn\u2019s argument drifts into incoherence, like when he describes a \u201cbelief in the exercise of unilateral military power\u201d as a Trumpian conviction that used to reign within the GOP until the party was captured by the neocons, though elsewhere Heilbrunn (and others) have ascribed unilateralism as a fundamental tenet of neoconservative ideology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m enjoying the Jewish hysteria. James “two-time winner of a National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association Award!” Kirchick writes: I find Trump\u2019s contempt for the basic functions of democracy\u2014in particular the First Amendment to the United States Constitution\u2014absolutely appalling. His … Continue reading
\nGiven his wink-wink, nudge-nudge circumlocutions about the Ku Klux Klan, it\u2019s easy to understand why Trump terrifies racial minorities. Yet Jews qua <\/i>Jews have been left out of the discussion about Trump\u2019s bigotry. Trump\u2019s daughter Ivanka, after all, is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, having married the scion of another corrupt New York real-estate mogul, Jared Kushner, and Trump has accumulated an abundance of Jewish friends and business partners over his many years in the Big Apple. As he reminded the debate audience last Thursday night, he was once the Grand Marshal of New York\u2019s annual Salute to Israel Parade. Indeed, as my Tablet magazine colleague Liel Leibovitz wrote<\/a> last year, at a time when many still viewed the Donald\u2019s campaign with a sense of curious bemusement rather than resigned terror, there is something <\/em>of the macher <\/em>in the \u201cvaudevillian\u201d Trump, an \u201cheir to a precious Jewish tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n