Michael Wolff: Trump ‘Aware Of Who’s Jewish In A Way That Feels Creepy’
President Donald Trump visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum on May 23, 2017, in Jerusalem, Israel. Image by GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images
By Aiden Pink January 8, 2018
The author of the bombshell new book exposing the inner workings of the White House said in an interview on Monday that President Trump is “aware of who is Jewish in a way that feels creepy.”
Michael Wolff, the author of the new book “Fire and Fury,” also said on MSNBC that he believes that Trump is racist, xenophobic and sexist, and that he views women in “as transactional a way as he thinks about everything.”
When asked by host Katy Tur whether he thinks Trump is anti-Semitic, Wolff demurred, saying that former White House chief advisor Steve Bannon — himself accused of anti-Semitism — thought Trump was a racist but not an anti-Semite.
Trump has repeatedly rejected claims that he is anti-Semitic. His daughter Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism, and she and her husband Jared Kushner are high-level advisors to the president (as are other Jews like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn). But the president has been criticized for retweeting anti-Semites and for failing to unequivocally condemn neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia last year.
In his book, Wolff quoted former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger describing the internal battle between Bannon and senior advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner for control of Trump’s agenda as “a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
