Kimberly Guilfoyle invokes ‘cosmopolitan elites’ in RNC speech

Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump, Jr. Image by Getty Images

By Helen Chernikoff August 25, 2020

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign executive and the girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr., used the phrase “cosmopolitan elites” — which invokes an anti-Semitic dogwhistle — in her speech during the Republican National Convention on Monday night.

. @kimguilfoyle invokes “cosmopolitan elites” in her #RNC speech. “Do you support the cancel culture, the cosmopolitan elites of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden who blame America first?” pic.twitter.com/VNzuuzfqWU

— Johnny Kunza (@johnkunza) August 25, 2020

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In its most anti-Semitic usage, the word “cosmopolitan” appears as a noun paired with the adjective “rootless,” wrote Forward columnist Aviya Kushner in a 2017 piece on the term, after Trump official Stephen Miller used it to criticize bias in the media.

According to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Kushner wrote, “anticosmopolitan campaign” was a “euphemism for the victimization of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late Stalin years.”

Guilfoyle was making an argument that Democrats wanted to control the average person — “how they think and how they live.”

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at chernikoff@forward.com and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

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