Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
“Godwin’s Law” says that the longer an online discussion continues, the probability of invoking Hitler and Nazis approaches one. But that law was coined many years ago. The odds today that extended debate will descend into anti-Jewish conspiracism seem almost as high. Now a constellation of figures — from JD Vance, the US vice-president, to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — are, wittingly or otherwise, making antisemitism respectable again.
America’s anti-Jewish threat comes largely from the right. Zohran Mamdani, New York’s likely next mayor, is widely accused of antisemitism because of his criticisms of Israel. Equating the two is highly questionable. He denies the charge and a non-trivial slice of Jewish New Yorkers back him. Even if Mamdani exercised the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant on Benjamin Netanyahu (he could not) would that stem from prejudice? Sixty-eight per cent of American Jews have negative views of Israel’s current government. Mamdani’s critique is no outlier.
Now take Vance. Confronted by a stream of anti-Jewish hatred on a Young Republicans WhatsApp group, the vice-president dismissed it as the kind of edgy humour in which kids indulge. He was referring to men in their twenties and thirties talking of sending their political opponents to the gas chambers. Whatever his other flaws, Mamdani does not speak like that. A conservative student last week asked Vance why the US helps Israel “considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours”.
Vance did not contest that most ancient of antisemitic tropes. More troubling, the audience applauded the question. Vance’s efforts to keep the Maga movement’s swelling ranks of antisemites onside without alienating traditional Republicans are destined to be clumsy. There is no elegant way to triangulate Holocaust-deniers with people who grasp basic history. Vance is chiefly after the Christian nationalist base. The term “Judeo-Christian” does not feature in his vocabulary. His aim is to be Trump’s natural heir.
Which invites the question of where Trump stands. On a personal level, Trump always claimed to like Jewish New Yorkers. More recently, he has won the loyalty of several Jewish donors by targeting antisemitism on US campuses. Critics of Israel are branded as Hamas supporters. Foreign students are routinely denied visas for voicing online criticisms of Israel. This seems likelier to fuel the problem than to fix it.
Either way, Trump has built his appeal on licensing every prejudice under the sun. That includes the west’s deadliest. In the primeval soup of nativist social media — and especially on Musk’s X — Nazi admiration is no longer in hiding. Some of the Maga right’s Hitlerism is presented as tongue-in-cheek. Since the online left likes to toss around the Nazi charge (see Godwin’s Law), the alt-right is merely trolling its accusers. After a while, however, satire turns into the real thing. Now it threatens to enter America’s bloodstream. Observers draw comfort from the fact that leading Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, have condemned antisemitism. Yet the same figures have done nothing meaningful to confront the toxic movement from which it comes. You cannot turn a blind eye to conspiracies about Satanic paedophile rings and expect the base will stop at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
America’s worst phase of antisemitism came before the second world war. Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement accused America’s Jews of trying to get the US embroiled in a European fight. “Antisemitism has been in the bones of white Christian nationalism in America in a way that it has never been on the left,” says Robert Kagan, author and historian. The equivalent today is the “great replacement theory” which holds that Jews are trying to make whites a minority by importing brown people. Musk stokes that theory. As does Tucker Carlson. Last week, Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, one of America’s leading Holocaust-deniers. The podcast was something of a love-in.
Carlson, like Vance, knows how to read the market. Having helped spawn a beast, riding it comes naturally. If they dismount, others will take their place. Cruz put it clearly: “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil”. Cruz was right. Had he been feeling braver, he would not have stopped there.
edward.luce@ft.com
