I don’t agree with all those who say Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving dinner with Kanye “Ye” West and Nick Fuentes is a measure of Trump’s not-so-secret hatred of Jews.
I think it’s a bigger betrayal than that.
Ye’s latest cultural contribution to America was his tweeting of an image of a swastika inside a Star of David and his podcast conversation with the scumbag Alex Jones, during which Ye told Jones, “I like Hitler.”
(For his part, Jones hasn’t made Jew-hatred a special passion. The “Infowars” blowhard prefers to go after the grieving families of Sandy Hook who lost their children in mass shootings.)
Then there’s Fuentes, the white supremacist and Holocaust denier whose supporters helped storm the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6, 2021. Fuentes wants to “save our country” from the Jews, he says. He joined Ye at the infamous Thanksgiving dinner with Trump.
Trump’s lame response when he heard the outraged political reaction to that meeting? He said Ye “showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.”
To which the New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz wrote that Trump didn’t know Fuente’s identity “because of the white hood his guest was wearing.”
Trump’s always got an excuse, not comic, but lying and lame.
The tip-off on his spinelessness first arrived in the aftermath of those imitation stormtroopers who marched in Charlottesville, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
“Good people on both sides,” Trump famously declared. At that time, the general impression was that Trump had inadvertently let out a secret many had already suspected: that he was antisemitic.
He got some cover from his daughter Ivanka and her conversion to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner. The usual Trump lapdogs asked, “How could Trump hate the Jews? Would he betray his own grandchildren, who are being raised in the Jewish faith?”
More recently, though, we’ve heard him issue warnings to Jews that they need to “appreciate” him “before it’s too late.”
Then came the uproar over his Thanksgiving meeting with Ye and Fuentes. Here is further proof, came a sweeping chorus of voices, that Trump does not like the Jews.
I believe this response is precisely backwards.
Trump doesn’t hate the Jews — he embraces them, insofar as he’s capable of embracing anyone other than himself.
Evidence is not just his own daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren. Trump’s always leaned on Jewish business associates and political advisors such as the sneering Stephen Miller.
But Trump’s in a tough position now. He’s losing elections he was supposed to win. He’s been abandoned by millions previously blinded by him. Even some Republican big shots, previously bootlickers, are making disapproving noises.
He needs friends, and he can always count on the bigots, whether it’s the big-booted gang in Charlottesville or Ye and Fuentes. They’re his base. They’re what he’s got left.
And since they’re all rabidly anti-Jew, Trump’s got to send out signals that he’s still with them.
It’s not that he hates the Jews. He likes the Jews.
But his embrace of the antisemites is his signal that he’ll betray anybody — even those he likes, even his own grandchildren — if it means saving his own ass.
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