Portside

In the midst of Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed crackdown on antisemitism, one key fact seems to have been overlooked: the antisemitism is coming from inside the house — the White House, to be specific.

The Trump administration has gone to extraordinary lengths in what it has sold to the public as a battle against antisemitism and those who spread it. It has asserted the right to strip permanent residency from people over their speech and deport them for writing op-eds, to defund universities for not cracking down harder on protests and speech, to treat student protesters like terrorists, including by raiding their homes, and is threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits over their political views, among other things.

But strangely, this crackdown has often fallen on individuals who don’t have any actual record of antisemitic behavior, no small number of them being Jewish themselves. It’s all enough to make you suspect that the actual goal here isn’t to rid American society of very real, poisonous bigotry toward Jews, and is more to lazily use them as an excuse to stifle political speech that Trump officials don’t like.

Something else that adds to those suspicions? The fact that the Trump administration is filled with people who have proudly associated with actual, unvarnished antisemites, or engaged in antisemitism of their own.

For instance, there are at least three separate administration officials who have associated with or praised (or both) notorious antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, the latter of whom has lately supplemented his sex trafficking and misogyny with shocking, open antisemitism. One of these officials, the White House’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, served not just on Tate’s legal defense team but worked as his publicist (while also enthusiastically attending one of Fuentes’s rallies where the influencer said calling Trump “a racist only makes me like him more”).

Speaking of Tate, the only reason he’s now in Florida and not rotting in jail in Romania — where he had been arrested and charged with rape and human trafficking last year — is because the Trump administration had repeatedly pressured the Romanian government to release him, all while Trump allies, including his own eldest son, loudly decried his “plight.” Tate has boasted that he is “very close with the Trump family” and is in touch with Trump’s youngest son, and Tate’s own lawyer all but confirmed Trump’s intervention won him his freedom. Upon returning, Tate was enthusiastically and personally welcomed back by Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a donor and longtime personal friend to Trump.

Bear in mind who we’re talking about here: Tate uses “Jew” as an insult, believes we were “lied” to about World War II (meaning the Holocaust) and that the idea the Nazis were bad guys is a “psyop,” that this supposedly false narrative has been used to “subvert the consciousness of Western populations into mass genetic suicide,” and wants to “bring the Nazi salute back,” which he has personally performed.

What’s particularly hypocritical is that Tate also openly supports and valorizes Hamas, whom he regards as “the masculine spirit of resistance” and has refused to condemn. Keen-eyed readers might note that this is the exact kind of speech that Trump officials regularly and falsely lob at left-leaning critics of Israel’s war of engaging in to justify throwing them out of the United States. For Tate, literally supporting Hamas and being an actual, open antisemite instead won him a one-way ticket back into it.

Incredibly, Tate isn’t the only open antisemite whose entry into the country the Trump administration has facilitated. One of the white Afrikaners that Trump decided should be allowed into the United States as “refugees” has, just two years ago, posted on X that Jews were “untrustworthy” and a “dangerous group” who were “not Gods chosen.” This somehow slipped past a Department of Homeland Security that now claims to prescreen the social media accounts of any foreigner entering the country for antisemitic content.

But back to the people serving in the Trump administration. Those same three Trump officials have also effusively praised and worked for the legal defense of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a laughable figure whose ridiculousness — he gave himself Adolf Hitler’s haircut and mustache — shouldn’t overshadow his racism: Hale-Cusanelli told his coworkers that “Hitler should have finished the job,” harassed and threatened a Jewish man in his home state of New Jersey, and posted a video complaining about a “Hasidic Jewish invasion” of the state, comparing orthodox Jews to a “plague of locusts.” Fortunately for Hale-Cusanelli, none of these repellent views prevented him from being let into Trump’s personal New Jersey golf club, where the president personally praised him and everyone in attendance as “amazing patriots.”

No less than the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, appeared eight times on the podcast of a guy who posted a photo of himself smiling and holding Mein Kampf with the comment, “Visionary leadership,” who doubts if the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the 6 million killed in the Holocaust were real, and believes that Americans are “a bunch of people that are sold out to Jews.” Another official — who was called even by the right-wing Jewish Insider “a prolific purveyor of antisemitic conspiracy theories” — has insisted on the debunked historical accusation that Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Georgia, raped and killed a thirteen-year-old, which was used to justify his lynching.

A sixth appointee, state department official Darren Beattie, had originally been fired from the first Trump administration after he spoke at a conference popular with white supremacists, speaking on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow, a guy who publishes arguments that Jewish judges are forcing racial integration and immigration on Americans. (Incidentally, Trump’s justice department got in hot water in his first term for sending out one of these antisemitic posts from Brimelow’s outfit). It’s true that Beattie is Jewish, but the Trump administration and his allies have long made clear they regard Jews who are critical of Israel as targets of their supposed antisemitism purge.

There’s also a seventh one: Sebastian Gorka, whose ties to and support for antisemitic groups in Hungary didn’t stop him from serving under Trump in his first term, or from returning for the second to serve as a national security advisor to the president. In no particular order, Gorka: cofounded a political party with former members of the openly antisemitic Jobbik party, with whose members he once associated; backed Jobbik’s creation of a paramilitary militia riddled with antisemites and objected to it being banned; wrote articles for a newspaper notorious for publishing Holocaust deniers and other antisemites; and is a sworn, lifelong member of the modern-day successor organization of a Nazi-collaborating nationalist group responsible for slaughtering Jews in World War II, to the point that he proudly wore its medal to Trump’s inaugural ball in 2017.

An eighth Trump appointee, National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent, went on the show of a neo-Nazi Youtuber and is also associated with Fuentes, to the point of once floating having the white supremacist influencer assist with his social media strategy. When people call Fuentes an antisemite and a white supremacist, by the way, they are not being hyperbolic: he has said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and “awesome,” that “all I want” is a “total Aryan victory,” and that he wants Jews to be killed in a “holy war,” because it’s “a problem that the people that are running your banks, that are making the movies your children watch … believe all Christians must die.”

Trump had endorsed and supported Kent’s earlier Congressional runs, just as Trump had last year supported, early and effusively, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson — a man who called himself a “black Nazi,” repeatedly denied the Holocaust, and had a habit of approvingly quoting Hitler, who he said he would have preferred to be the US president instead of Barack Obama.

Then there’s Elon Musk. He and Trump may have had a falling out, but for a long time the two were as close as you could possibly get, with Trump virtually tying himself to the billionaire megadonor. Musk has a long history of questionable behavior around antisemitism, including telling a poster who claimed “western Jewish populations” were flooding their countries with “hordes of minorities” that he was saying “the actual truth,” and, of course, doing an honest-to-God Heil-Hitler salute at Trump’s inauguration. It’s worth noting that while some have tried to play off Musk’s gesture as a misinterpreted “awkward gesture,” white supremacists themselves were well aware of what they saw.

“It wasn’t even like a, like a subtle, like a wave,” Fuentes giddily told his followers afterwards. “That was a straight-up, like, Sieg Heil, like, loving-Hitler energy.”

It is important to be really clear about what all of these antisemites linked to Trump and the people around him have been accused of. It’s not that they used outdated language that we now think of as offensive, said things that could be construed as antisemitic, made remarks long ago that they have since disavowed, or criticized Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians in ways that are now cynically being redefined as antisemitic. No, they have said explicitly, unambiguously antisemitic things, recently, often on video, and are frequently open and unembarrassed about their bigotry toward Jews.

And that’s all before we get to the president himself, who, besides all of the associations above, has even longer history of remarks and behavior that, if his administration was serious about its crackdown on antisemitism, would get him fired from his own presidency. That includes things like keeping a collection of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed, or his statement that “the only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

But to simplify things, let’s just stick to incidents in the recent past. Like when Trump hosted Fuentes and Kanye West, then in the middle of a spree of public antisemitic behavior, for a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Or the many times he criticized Jews for not being “appreciative” enough of Israel. Or the time he preemptively blamed Jewish voters for potentially losing the election. Or a month ago when he referred to greedy money-lenders as “shylocks.”

It’s tempting to say that the Trump administration is failing by its own standards at checking the spread of antisemitism. But that wouldn’t really be accurate. That’s because the Trump administration’s standard seems to be that open, undisguised antisemitism is just fine — as long as you’re a political ally, and as long as you don’t criticize the actions of the Israeli government.

This is the fruit of what I warned a year ago was shaping up into a new form of McCarthyism, which drew on the wildly successful British model that destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership and ultimately purged the Left from the party. That playbook involved redefining antisemitism as criticism of Israeli policy and aggressively going after anyone who violated the new speech codes, even if they were Jewish themselves. But give Trump and his allies some credit for innovating: they’re the ones who added making an alliance with outright antisemites to this tried-and-true formula.

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month. Subscribe to Jacobin magazine.