Former President Donald Trump at a Christian conference in Florida last week. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld July 30, 2024

Republicans have been trying to use antisemitism to win votes for years, following a roadmap created by former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney. Cheney, who was drummed out of office for supporting the impeachment of former President Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 riot, was fond of saying that the Democratic Party is “the party of antisemitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism.”

Today’s Republicans are still working hard to paint antisemitism as a liberal problem. They have held a battery of congressional hearings accusing Ivy League university presidents of fostering a dangerous climate for Jewish students, and generally try to present antisemitism as a by-product of woke politics.

Trump has never been known for message discipline. But he is a master of metabolizing the issues that animate his political base and seems to be trying that with antisemitism.

Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people,” Trump told a Chrisitan political conference Friday, ignoring the fact that she is married to one. “That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. She’s not going to change.”

Trump, whose daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism, was teeing off Harris’ decision to skip Netanyahu’s speech for a pre-scheduled Black sorority event. Earlier in the week he told voters in North Carolina that Harris was “totally against the Jewish people.”

Trump’s approach shares an element of President Joe Biden’s tendency to conflate Jews with Israel, but adds a transactional element. He sees American Jews as a single-issue constituency that only cares about Israel. And he seems eternally frustrated that 76% of Jews voted against him in 2020, something he has attributed to “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

He repeated the insult on Truth Social Friday, saying, “Any Jewish person who votes for Kamala, or a Democrat, should immediately have their head examined.”

Seems like a strange tactic to try to win over Jewish voters. But Trump may have someone else in mind: voters who are not Jewish but really like Jews.

“I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country,” Trump told Axios in 2021.

Many evangelicals are, indeed, enthusiastic Zionists, believing that the establishment of the modern state of Israel was a biblical prophecy. A Pew poll found more evangelicals expressing a positive view of Jews than any other religious group except Mormons.

This philosemitism is embraced by some Jews, including Elan Carr, Trump’s antisemitism envoy. Others worry that it’s based on broad-brush stereotypes — Jews are religiously observant and love Israel, for example — and can quickly become conditional when Jews fail to match those characteristics.

That’s how Trump can rail against the supposedly disloyal, ignorant and crazy majority of Jews while reassuring Ami Magazine that he is “not talking about Orthodox Jews.” And, similarly, how Doug Mastriano, the Christian nationalist state lawmaker in Pennsylvania, could launch his campaign for governor two years ago by donning a tallit and blowing the shofar before unleashing what critics viewed as a series of thinly veiled antisemitic insults toward his Jewish opponent, Josh Shapiro. An adviser called Shapiro, who keeps kosher, “at best a secular Jew.”

The former president also agreed Tuesday with Sid Rosenberg, a radio host who called Emhoff, Harris’ husband, “a crappy Jew” and a “horrible Jew.”

Trump loves to play to his base. So his rhetoric around antisemitism may best be understood as a way of helping convince his existing supporters that they are on the right side of the “Jewish” issue, no matter what most Jews think, do and say.

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