To the Editor:
J
ames Kirchick’s careful analysis of the ideas or impulses animating Trump supporters misses one point and evades an important question [“Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades,” May]. For every anti-Semite or racist one can find at a Trump rally, there is an equal and opposite anti-Semite or racist in the Democratic underground or at every Bernie Sanders rally. A candidate, such as Sanders, who accuses Israel of murdering 10,000 Gazans and who appoints Cornel West to the Democratic Platform Committee, necessarily—perhaps intentionally—attracts such supporters.
The question: Is a potential Trump presidency worse in this regard than another four years of far-left leadership? My answer is “no,” though I acknowledge that the question admits of no simple answer.
Proving that Trump’s most committed supporters have no respectable ideas is far too easy and avoids the difficult problem we all must face.
Jerome Marcus
Address withheld
To the Editor:
J
ames Kirchick’s “Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades” does not present a balanced picture of Trump supporters or of the dangers that Jews now face. The left is the dominant source of contemporary anti-Semitism, and it is reasonable to believe that bigoted leftists feel emboldened when major universities, the White House, and the United Nations engage in relentless criticism of Israel while dismissing the dangers Jews face worldwide.
Sadly, the unenforceable Iran deal is the work of Democrats, including Jewish Democrats. The deal makes it harder for Israel to defend itself, exposing the Jewish people to another Holocaust—one that could be accomplished with a single atomic bomb.
As a moderate Republican Jewish man who supports Trump, I certainly accept that he is not precise in his statements, but his administration would not be staffed with anti-Israel leftists, and his daughter is a religious Jew. I believe Jews, whether they vote for him or not, should recognize this and show him more respect.
Virtually all totalitarian behavior in the United States comes from the left. Harassment of conservatives and pro-Israel speakers has been a standard feature of college life for decades, the IRS targets conservatives, and there are regular physical attacks on Trump supporters. Compare all that with some nasty tweeters.
Arthur Wiegenfeld
New York City
James Kirchick writes:
B
oth Jerome Marcus and Arthur Wiegenfeld write compellingly on the scourge of left-wing anti-Semitism. But my article was not about left-wing anti-Semitism. It was about the toxic sewer of bigotries (including, but hardly limited to, anti-Jewish bigotry) discharged into our society thanks to the presidential aspirations of one Donald John Trump. Not since George Wallace ran on a platform of racial segregation has a major-party presidential candidate appealed so nakedly to the American people’s most invidious instincts. Whatever one thinks of Bernie Sanders, and I don’t think much, it is absurd to compare his campaign to Trump’s in this regard.
Over the decades, there has been no shortage of articles about left-wing anti-Semitism in Commentary and other publications. This selective focus mostly is due, as Mr. Wiegenfeld rightly points out, to the fact that “the left is the dominant source of contemporary anti-Semitism” today. But those of us tasked with monitoring anti-Semitism simply underestimated the degree to which it still exists in some precincts of the American right. Perhaps the most disheartening facet of this perpetually depressing presidential election has been the unadulterated Jew-hatred espoused by Trump’s supporters, a phenomenon that does not seem to bother Trump in the least.
Indeed, shortly after my article was published, Trump retweeted an image depicting Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of raining dollar bills and a six-pointed star proclaiming her the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” The image had been lifted from a well-known neo-Nazi Web forum. As is his wont, Trump went to great lengths denying that he had done anything wrong, insisting that what was clearly meant to be a Star of David was in fact a “Sheriff’s star.” No answer was forthcoming as to what he was doing retweeting images from the racist bowels of the Internet.
That Trump is somehow immune to anti-Semitism on account of his daughter being a convert to Judaism is not exculpatory. It is an echo of the “some of my best friends are Jews” defense. Over the course of his long and well-documented career, Trump has shown himself willing to say or do anything in order to gain riches or power, and it is the height of naiveté to assume that he wouldn’t resort to anti-Semitic incitement or pursue anti-Semitic policies if he thought it in his personal interest to do so. But don’t take it from me: Trump’s rise has delighted seemingly every racist in the country, from David Duke (whose bid for the Louisiana Republican Senate nomination Trump did not rule out endorsing) to Louis Farrakhan. They discern something to like in Trump that somehow escapes the more forgiving eyes of Messrs. Marcus and Wiegenfeld, and I don’t think they’re wrong.
Finally, many Republican Jews seem to take comfort in the fact that Trump has so far limited his bigoted statements to Mexicans, Muslims, and other traditionally “non-white” groups. (To reach this conclusion, however, one would have to excuse his remarks at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he stated that he was a “negotiator, like you folks” and declared, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”) Jews ignore the threat Trump poses — to our democracy and the world — at their peril. For as I’ve written elsewhere, “Donald Trump is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”
