Republicans’ antisemitic outbursts stretch back to Nixon and Reagan

Whereas the traditional hatred is based on Jews’ alleged control, Trump has added an envy and appropriation of Jewish victimhood.

Earlier this month, Haaretz reported on a recent “uptick” of Holocaust and antisemitic conspiracy references in the messaging of Republican officials and candidates. These range from referring to a Jewish candidate as the antichrist to conspiracies involving billionaire George Soros to describing the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence as “Gestapo tactics.”

Yet, as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), this uptick is not quite so recent and results from the mainstreaming of antisemitism and racism during the Trump presidency. Antisemitism has a long history in American politics and has not always been closeted.

Although white supremacist activism through the 20^th century focused primarily on race, an undercurrent of antisemitism was always present. And, long before Donald Trump, antisemitism had penetrated the White House.

Republican president Richard Nixon believed that “most Jews are disloyal”, his antisemitism well-established by historians. Nixon’s antisemitic comments were made in private and revealed as a result of his secretly taping his Oval Office meetings.

In 1985, president Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at a cemetery in the German city of Bitburg, controversially stating that German soldiers “were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Thirty years would pass before Trump identified the “good people on both sides” at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally in 2017.

These words, along with Trump’s demonisation of immigrants, Muslims, and people from “shithole countries” in general, led to what the SPLC calls “The Trump Effect”, “a surge of incidents involving racial slurs and symbols [and] bigotry”.

There is a new element to antisemitism in the Trump era. Historically, antisemitism revolved around hatred of the Jew as embodying both an essential otherness and as the locus of an imagined extraordinary power to secretly dominate society to the detriment of Christians. Certainly, this expression of antisemitism is very much alive today.

What Trump has added to the recipe is what might be called an envy and appropriation of Jewish victimhood. Hence, the proliferation of imagery of and about the Holocaust and Nazism in Republican messaging.

A false sense of victimhood is among the traits psychologist John Gartner has ascribed to Trump’s malignant narcissism. That is the trait that came to the fore when Trump announced in August of 2020 that he could only lose the election if it were rigged, thereby sowing the seeds of “stop the steal”.

As a narcissist, Trump could not lose. He could only be the victim of theft. And, as a pathological narcissist, he could not be just any victim; he must be the world’s greatest victim, just as he must be the greatest at everything. The problem was that the title of greatest victim was already taken… by the Jews.

This is the root of the appropriation of Holocaust references and images by the Republicans. Mar-a-Lago was raided, not by the FBI, but by the Gestapo. When Republicans rail against Democratic campaigns for abortion rights or gun control these are no longer described merely as injustices. Now, they are part of a “Holocaust”.

We all got a good laugh when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of operating a “gazpacho police” but Greene is merely an extremely dumb example of a growing and increasingly mainstreamed narrative.

Greene has also called canvassers doing vaccine outreach “medical brown shirts” and compared vaccination logos on the name badges of vaccinated supermarket employees to yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Alarmingly, we see the same phenomenon in Australia where Nazi analogies were used to attack Victoria’s pandemic laws, with one MP depicting Premier Dan Andrews as Hitler on social media.

What is clear in Victoria as in the US is that today, for the far Right to be out of power, it can only be as victims. And what better victims to emulate than the Jews.

The appropriation of the Holocaust in this manner amounts to the antisemitic erasure of a significant component of the history and identity of the Jewish people.

While none of the recent attacks targeting Jewish individuals or institutions have shown a clear link to this mainstreaming of antisemitism among leading Republicans, the January 6 insurrection demonstrates sufficiently the violence inherent in the narrative of false victimhood cloaked in the rhetoric of a just cause.

This threat of violence is real and present. After the Mar-a-Lago raid, an armed gunman in body armour attempted to enter an FBI office in Cincinnati, The gunman was shot and killed by police after he fled the scene and engaged in an hours-long stand-off.

Miami’s Temple Beth David, the synagogue of Judge Bruce Reinhart who signed the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, cancelled services after a deluge of antisemitic abuse. One user of the imageboard 4chan wrote of Reinhart "That is a kike. And a paedophile… He should be tried for treason and executed."

Much of the uptick reported by Haaretz is a reflection of it being primary election season, a time when candidates endeavour to distinguish themselves. Among today’s Republicans, in all too many cases, distinction comes from extremes of rhetoric in defence of Trump’s victimhood, a victimhood they embrace as their own.

It is only a matter of time until this rhetoric results in violence, certainly not unless powerful voices denounce it. If the Democrats speak out, their words and motives will be twisted to add fuel to the fire. And the Republican leadership is still sucking up, if not always to Trump himself, then to the extremist movement he brought out of the shadows.

As the very real threats once faced by Jews are taken on in the fabricated victimhood of the far Right, it is hard to avoid concluding that, sooner or later, it is Jews who will, once again, serve as scapegoats.

“I don’t think Mar-a-Lago means every Jewish person needs to keep their head on a swivel,” Oren Segal, vice president of the Centre on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, told The Forward last week. “I just think we’re in a particular dangerous time in this country. And everybody should be concerned.”