Miriam Adelson, widow of billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, applauds as former President Donald Trump leaves the stage at an event titled “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America” on Sept. 19. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Rob Eshman September 20, 2024

I’ve got just one small question: Did someone tell former President Donald Trump that the whole point of an antisemitism conference is to reduce antisemitism?

Dr. Miriam Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, convened the “Fighting Antisemitism in America” conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday, handing former President Donald Trump an easy political layup: Show up, express concern, explain your plan. 

What Trump did instead was take the ball, pop it, and blow raspberries at the people in the stands. 

“If I don’t win this election,” Trump said at the event, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with that.” 

He’s wrong, of course. Statistically, there just aren’t enough Jews in the swing states to move the election needle. 

But Trump might have moved the needle in another way: By putting Jews even more centrally in the crosshairs of every conspiracy theorist in America. 

“Preemptively blaming American Jews for your potential election loss does zero to help American Jews,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “The speech will likely spark more hostility and further inflame an already bad situation.”

I’m among a (dwindling) number of Trump critics who don’t believe he is genuinely antisemitic — he likes Jews as much as he can like anybody who isn’t himself. But at some point, what difference does it make?

When he says Jews who vote for Democrats “need their head examined,” he’s demonizing 70% of American Jews. (At the Thursday event he also claimed to be getting 40% of the Jewish vote. If that happens, I’ll eat my pet.) 

When he constantly invokes the idea that Jews have a dual loyalty to Israel, he’s echoing one of history’s most durable antisemitic tropes. 

When he dines with vicious antisemites like Nick Fuentes and then claims ignorance of their bigoted views, he’s giving hate a presidential seal of approval.

When he said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if a Jewish financier, George Soros, is funding a flood of illegal immigrants into America, he’s helping fuel longstanding conspiracy theories that suggest Jews are working to replace white Christians.

When supporters of his campaign fund a shadowy campaign in Michigan to highlight the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband is a Jewish supporter of Israel, in order to win a few Muslim votes in a tight race, they’re working to destroy Muslim Jewish relations. There’s been no disavowal of the ad, so far, from the Trump campaign.

Trump denies the antisemitism in all of this. But that is also part of his rhetorical genius – call it, to appropriate another Trump term, his antisemitic “weave.” He puts out messages that are clearly designed to denigrate the people who don’t support him and placate the most extreme groups that do, and then, when pressed, plays innocent.

There’s another term for this. Dog whistles.

“There are fine people on both sides,” which Trump said during the racist, antisemitic 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the ur-example of this, so famous it came up in his debate with Harris. Trump loves to say it’s a quote taken out of context. I’ve read the transcript at least a dozen times, and it’s true: He said it, and he also said more, that I suppose someone might read as potentially changing the statement’s meaning — I don’t. You say potato, I say Jew-hatred.

Adelson deeply cares about Israel and Jews. I don’t blame her or the people who attended or spoke at the conference for Trump’s shocking targeting of American Jews. Judaism is a big tent, generous enough to handle people of all backgrounds and political persuasions. 

But what good is having a voice if you don’t use it?

I am hoping Adelson understands the damage Trump’s words at her conference have already caused, and that they could lead to in the future. Her candidate of choice could have spent his time on stage outlining a thoughtful plan to combat antisemitism, as detailed as the one the Biden administration developed. (He could also have explained why, if he were so good on this issue, antisemitism skyrocketed during his administration).

Instead he blew his most damaging dog whistle yet. Why? Because the race is close, and he will do anything to win it — up to invoking one of antisemitism’s most vicious tropes, that it is the Jews who always stab society in the back. 

Somebody did in fact get stabbed in the back Thursday night. Except it was the victim who was Jewish, not the perpetrator. And she paid $100 million for the privilege.

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