In a newly-aired interview by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, would-be fascist dictator Donald Trump went on a rant and articulated a series of antisemitic tropes including that Jews control the US Congress and media and have “dual loyalty” to both Israel and America.
Several clips of Trump’s interview with Ravid were played on Thursday evening for the first time on the “Unholy Podcast,” a weekly program moderated by Yonit Levi of Channel 12 Israel from Tel Aviv and Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian from London.
The interview was conducted by Ravid in preparation for a book he has written about the Abraham Accords negotiated between the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates on August 13, 2020, while Trump was the president.
In the first clip, Trump began by attempting to disguise his antisemitism by talking about his father’s “very close” connection with Jewish people in the New York City real estate market and his “many Jewish friends” and his “great love of Israel.”
Trump then went into his rant, “There’s people in this country that are Jewish that no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the Evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country.”
Trump attacked Jews who have not supported him, “It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress and today I think it’s the exact opposite, and I think Obama and Biden did that. And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people…which tells you that the Jewish people, and I’ve said this for a long time. The Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.”
The former president and leader of the Republican Party quickly transitioned to the subject of who controls the media, “I mean, you look at the New York Times, the New York Times hates Israel, hates them, and they’re Jewish people that run the New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”
This is not the first time that Trump’s antisemitism has been on display before the world. In the lead up to his campaign for the party’s nomination in the 2016 elections, Trump spoke to a group of Jewish Republicans and called them “great negotiators” and talked about how they wanted to “control” their own politicians. Trump also said that the Republicans would not support him because he did not “want [their] money” but that he would be the “best thing to ever happen to Israel.”
In August 2017, Trump came to the defense of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged through Charlottesville, Virginia with torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Speaking to the press following the Unite the Right rally, which resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer by one of the fascists, he said that the far-right mob included “very fine people.”
The repetition of anti-Jewish stereotypes by Trump might be dismissed as the ramblings of an ignoramus if it were not for the fact that he has repeatedly—both after he was elected as president in 2016 and after he was defeated in 2020—advanced himself as a dictator-president by attempting to overthrow the US Constitution and by directly emulating Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
In his August 2020 speech at the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, Trump delivered a fascist speech from the White House lawn, which was characterized by the World Socialist Web Site as a run for Führer, at which he said, “This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.” He declared that “Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism” and for “wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders.”
When Trump returned to the White House on October 5, 2020, after being hospitalized with COVID-19, he clearly modeled Hitler’s arrival at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress as depicted in the Nazi film Triumph of the Will.
As more details about the events of January 6 at the US Capitol continue to emerge, it is becoming clearer that on that day, Donald Trump had mobilized a fascistic mob in order to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden as President and thereby remain in office as dictator-president.
As was the case throughout the twentieth century, the use of antisemitism is integral to the development of right-wing violence and fascism which is ultimately aimed at suppressing the struggles of the working class.