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.