Trump Is Walking a Thin Plank Between Anti-Semites and Hardline Israel
Not an inch to maneuver
by ANDREW DOBBS
Few facts better suggest just how dreadful things are today than the fact that Donald Trump’s rise requires us to once again consider “the Jewish question.”
In the last week of December 2016, U.S. president-elect Trump has shifted from a once-polite transition relationship with Pres. Barack Obama’s administration to one of hostility focused in large part on the United States’ abstention from a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlement practices.
Yet despite this loyalty to Israel, Trump’s campaign engaged in anti-semitic politics in a way not seen in this country for generations — and has empowered organized anti-semitism in a manner unprecedented for this government.
On the other other hand, he has put important Jewish people into positions of power in his coming administration. His political strength is rooted in a virulent mass movement that is allegedly anti-semitic in a way that Trump’s policy and political choices should threaten.
How does this contradiction resolve itself in Trump’s regime?
It is undeniable that Trump’s campaign and subsequent administration are lousy with anti-semitism. More ink has been spilled and pixels lit up by hot takes on the “alt-right” since the election than on almost any other topic, but there has been no more perceptive and terrifying an analysis of the movement than the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website’s guide to it published weeks before Trump’s election.
The guide explains that Trump’s campaign was the “nexus of the centerpoint” — you know they mean it because they’re redundant — of the alt-right. “The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based,” the guide continues, “is that whites are undergoing an extermination via mass immigration into white countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of white self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda.”
Unambiguous and coherent — the alt-right is fundamentally, inalienably anti-semitic. This should explain why the movement’s most important representative in the Trump administration — former Breitbart head Steve Bannon — has a history of anti-semitism of his own.
Bannon went as far as to complain that his daughters were going to school with too many Jewish kids, according to his ex-wife.
Under Bannon’s leadership — he took over from the late founder of the site, Andrew Breitbart, who was Jewish — Breitbart never explicitly published anti-semitic articles, but certainly promoted groups and movements that were as unambiguously anti-semitic as the quotes above would suggest.
It also gave a platform to Milo Yiannapoulis and others who claimed that anti-semitism doesn’t exist in U.S. politics. All of this led the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO to condemn Bannon’s appointment as Trump’s chief White House strategist position.
And Trump himself trades in anti-semitic stereotypes. The president-elect was outraged that he had African-American accountants working for him, according Trumped!, former Trump aide John O’Donnell’s 1991 tell-all book.
O’Donnell claimed that Trump said the only people he wanted “counting his money” were “short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
In December 2015, Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition, saying that they probably wouldn’t support him because he wouldn’t accept their money, suggesting that they were all “deal-makers” and otherwise obsessed with money.
He also notoriously retweeted a meme featuring Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of money and a Star of David emblazoned with the slogan “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.”
Online journalists later revealed that the meme originated on the birthplace of the Alt Right — the /pol/ board on 8chan — and was first tweeted out by an alt-right Twitter account that also featured racist and anti-semitic imagery including Jewish journalists Photoshopped to make their noses large and hooked.
This begs the question of whether Trump was following a no-name anti-semite of this type. He had already been caught retweeting an account called “White Genocide” that said it was based in “Jewmerica.” He retweeted that account not once, but twice.
Finally in the late days of the race, Trump’s campaign ran a T.V. ad that depicted Jewish financial leaders along with a voiceover suggesting a global bankers plot to undermine America’s national power — a clear appeal to classic anti-semitic tropes.
Yet despite Trump’s comfort with anti-Jewish hatemongers and his trade in shopworn stereotypes, he has both elevated Jewish people to significant roles in his administration and taken on some key Jewish political priorities.
First and foremost is the fact that Trump’s own daughter Ivanka — whom Trump appears to be grooming as a first-lady stand-in and head of his business enterprise — is a Jewish convert. And her husband Jared Kushner is a devoutly observant Orthodox Jew.
Kushner is also one of Trump’s key advisors, and there is allegedly a rivalry within the Trump-iverse between Kushner and the anti-semite true-believer Steve Bannon.
Trump has furthermore taken a profoundly pro-Jewish stance on the one political issue specific to the Jewish community, U.S. relations with Israel.
Within the Jewish community there is tremendous diversity of opinion about Israel, and in Israel itself there is a hot and historic debate about the country’s role in the world. That said, among Jewish conservatives and Jewish Republicans there is an essential uniformity of opinion on the matter — Israel is always right.
Trump signaled his alignment with this position by nominating David M. Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel — one of the first diplomatic posts he announced.
Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, supports aggressive settlement building in occupied Palestinian territory, opposes a two-state solution and has said that Israel should annex the entire West Bank.
What Israel should do with the more than 1.7 million Palestinians living there is anyone’s guess, but granting them democratic rights in the country they were born and raised in seems out of the question.
Friedman has also compared progressive Jewish voices critical of Israel to “kapos” — Jewish guards in the Nazi death camps. In fact, he’s suggested that pro-peace Jews are worse than the kapos were.
The key to this contradiction between Trump’s anti-semitic politics and arch-Zionist policy is, I believe, an understanding of the basic source of instability in all fascist regimes.
The Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti was one of historic fascism’s most perceptive analysts. A primary collaborator with the legendary revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti analyzed Mussolini’s rule for years and then adapted his findings to the Third Reich, defining fascism as “the open dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic elements of monopoly finance capital.”
Sound familiar?
Still, there aren’t a lot of votes among crackpot billionaires. Movements such as Trump’s can only gain power by mobilizing a particular mass base that’s susceptible to their manipulations — typically small-business owners, retail and middle-management types, salespeople, low-end professionals, skilled laborers and the industrial middle class, who all feel that they’re losing out on a changing economy.
The politics of this class are always the same. They want big changes because the status quo is screwing them, but they don’t want to change the things that benefit them. They want to throw the bums out, but they don’t want to threaten their own privileges.
Anti-semitism was one of the earliest formal expressions of lower-middle-class reaction in Western politics, and Trump’s anti-semitism and much of his race-hate message is an appeal to his mass base. It’s a means of mobilizing the political movement he needs to seize and maintain power so that he and his regime can serve that reactionary vanguard of monopoly capital.
And while paying lip service to anti-semitic and racist notions carried Trump into power, it’s in the interests of his true constituency to empower Israeli extremism today. Concentrated economic power of the sort he’s serving needs imperialism to gain it access to every last bit of exploitable resources and human labor available among the weaker nations of the world.
This means mass suppression of the so-called “developing world,” the subjugation of modest industrial powers to the leadership of the superpowers and the coordination of superpowers among themselves to the benefit of their common economic overlords.
Israel is a key element in this scheme. It provides the dominant Western imperialist powers with a strategic military and economic ally in the midst of a crucial and potentially threatening region of the world.
Israel has performed this role in superlative fashion.The tiny country has quietly collaborated with the reactionary regional allies of Western monopoly finance capitalism — Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, post-Nasser Egypt, the mainstream of Fatah — and attacked and confronted those nations that sought to resist this imperialism — Syria, Iran, Egypt under Nasser, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
This isn’t to say that all the regimes Israel fights are good and the ones it likes are bad — there’s plenty of wretchedness to go around. But some of these parties and states aim to resist Western capital’s impositions on the region and others want to see if they can play along and get along.
Israel bombs and destabilizes the former, so that we don’t have to leave our own fingerprints all over them.
The billionaires who will profit under Trump’s regime also benefit from Israel’s power. But why doesn’t Trump just play along with the alt-right base in order to keep it happy?
It’s because Trump’s actual mass base isn’t the alt-right, it’s that aforementioned mob of resentful, white, lower-middle-class workers who wouldn’t know Milo Yiannapoulis from Jesse Katsopolis.
The alt-right itself suffers an internal split of its own between, on one hand, a broadly appealing white supremacy that rejects social progress for women, queer people and trauma survivors and, on the other hand, an arcane anti-Jewish cosmology that the average American racist just doesn’t give a shit about.
Ask a laid-off industrial worker or nearly underwater suburban homeowner who gets off on Trump’s meanness what they think of Jews and you might get some ugly opinions, but you might also get some shrugs or even — thanks to the vicissitudes of right-wing evangelical Christianity — some nice words about Israel.
They might appreciate the racist, alt-right media that reinforces their own prejudices, but that doesn’t mean they buy all of the alt-right’s ideology. Trump can appoint Mel Brooks and Eugene Levy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for all they care, as long as he keeps pissing off the eggheads.
Trump knows this because he gets demagoguery better than does practically any other figure in U.S. history. He also knows dominance in a way only a rapist can. He knows that the reactionary monopoly capitalists benefiting most from his regime give him tremendous power, but that he needs to keep them on their toes, too.
Nothing rattles their cages quite like the occasional relapse into outright anti-semitism. For Trump, watching his Goldman Sachs-pedigreed treasury secretary and white shoe lawyer-cum-ambassador to Israel sit and take it shows the world just how much power Trump really has.
This is the solution to the contradiction. Trump serves imperialist interests that way outrank any alt-right geeks who believe they got Trump elected. But even those interests can’t count on Trump not to flip out over some minor provocation … and fuck them over.
Trump is consolidating power while keeping even his closest allies on edge. They tolerate it because they are going to make trillions of dollars off him. But the price they pay is their precarious hold on the president-elect’s favor.
This contradiction also hosts the seeds of Trump’s eventual undoing. Togliatti insisted that regimes of this sort are both completely unsustainable, and they leave ample room within themselves for struggle.
That is the task at hand right now for those who hate both Trump and his neo-Nazi fanbase — to organize, strategize and fight against race-hatred, corporate power and imperialism. To work for economic justice, democracy and racial and national liberation.
These are the narrow and corrupted slats Trump is standing on. We can kick them out from underneath his wobbly feet.
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