‘The impending rematch between the current and former presidents is terrible for the Jews — and every other minority group in this country’ Photo by Getty Images/Collage by Odeya Rosenband

By Jodi Rudoren January 26, 2024

With this week’s New Hampshire primary dealing a probably fatal blow to Nikki Haley’s campaign, November’s presidential contest promises to pit two of the most avowedly pro-Israel politicians in U.S. history against each other. Again.

Joe “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist” Biden has given Israel unprecedented verbal support and American military backup since the start of the brutal war against Hamas — including today’s decision to cut off U.S. aid to UNWRA over suspected ties to the terror group. Donald “Nobody is more pro-Israel than I am” Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem and spawned the Abraham Accords. They both have Jewish in-laws and love to sprinkle a bisel Yiddishkeit into their speeches and schedules.

Yet the impending rematch between the current and former presidents is terrible for the Jews — and every other minority group in this country facing stereotyping, harassment, hate speech, discrimination or violent threat.

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Because every day that Trump is on the campaign trail is a day our public discourse is degraded. A day when people are encouraged to dismiss and dehumanize those who disagree with them. A day of dog whistles and doxxing and disinformation.

Just look at Trump’s victory speech in New Hampshire Tuesday night. He said things that weren’t true, he made fun of Haley’s dress, and his evil-twin sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy bizarrely invoked George Soros, the Jewish billionaire bogeyman of the far-right imagination. Bad, bad, bad for Jews.

Biden, to his credit, cited Trump’s idiotic “good people on both sides” rationalization of Charlottesville’s antisemitism-laced Unite the Right rally as a raison d’etre for his 2020 White House bid, and tried mightily to put us out of the muck. But the man who originally described himself as a “bridge” president, suggesting he would step aside after a single term, is stuck in an outdated and failed “two-state solution” framework that is exacerbating generational breakdowns among liberal Jews and between us and our natural political partners.

And whatever you think of Biden’s policies toward the Middle East — or other issues — the simple fact of a 2020 rematch keeps us stuck in that toxic time when what we need more than anything is a new political dynamic.

The fact that it’s a replay between two old white men who’ve done the job before and have approval ratings stuck around 40% does not bode well for turnout among young or other unlikely voters. The worse news? We have 284 days of this demeaning do-over to suffer through.

When my leftist friends were freaking out about the future of the republic after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, I was sure they were overestimating the potential danger. I believed our democratic institutions were too strong to be destroyed by any individual leader.

I was right in a literal way — the courts blocked scores of misguided Trump policies that would have hurt immigrants, workers, poor people or the environment; Congress managed to pass budgets and avoid wars; and, most importantly, his efforts to overturn his defeat at the polls in 2020 were stymied.

But I was wrong in a more serious way. I did not understand how much damage could be done by giving the ultimate bully pulpit to the ultimate bully. The hate and distrust Trump has unleashed is coursing through every corner of our society today, and its dangerous for Jews and other living things.

You might think it’s a stretch to blame this right-wing autocrat for the spike in antisemitism from the woke left we have experienced since the war spawned by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Look closer, and you can see Trump fingerprints on anti-Zionist speeches and social media posts touting “alternative facts” and in incendiary chants invoking blood-libelous tropes.

Normalization of lying is bad for the Jews. Refusal to debate is bad for the Jews. Demonization of difference is bad for the Jews. Plummeting trust in public institutions, including the media, is very bad for the Jews.

I’ve been in a bunch of depressing conversations in the past few weeks about Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor who is — or is it time to say “was”? — the last barrier between us and this depressing rerun of 2020.

I’ve suggested that having a woman of color head a major-party ticket could be transformational — only to be shouted down by outrage over her position on abortion. Democrats who are rightfully terrified of Trump returning to the White House nonetheless prefer his name atop the ballot, convinced that Haley would have a better chance of beating Biden.

They have a point, given her strong showing with independents in New Hampshire, but it’s almost beside the point, because that whole way of thinking is part of how Trumpism has devastated our politics. I know it’s better for my 16-year-old daughter — and son — to see a candidate for the nation’s highest office crack wise about running in high heels than to see a serial sexual harasser making misogynist comments about what she wears.

My friend and former colleague Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, this week described the looming rematch as one not just between two presidents but between two Americas. He called ours an “increasingly tribal society” where mounting numbers of Democrats see Republicans as immoral and vice versa.

To me, the most devastating statistics in his article were these: In 1960, about 4% of Americans said they’d be displeased if their kid married someone from the other party. Today, it’s 40% — and only 4% of our marriages are politically mixed. What kind of melting pot is that?

We may be stuck with a Biden-Trump rematch, and with Trump’s debilitating rhetoric, for the next 10 months. But we don’t have to accept the degradation in our discourse. The Jewish thing to do is to tell the truth and respect differing perspectives as well as those who hold them. Whatever they might be wearing.

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