DAN COLEMAN: Trump’s rivals need to unite in a manner they failed to do in 2016 to stop support among extremists from winning him the nomination.

At a news conference late last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy, and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

McConnell was responding to Donald Trump’s dinner meeting with celebrity antisemite Ye (formerly Kanye West), high-profile neofascist Nick Fuentes and alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, appearing on Newsnation, said Trump “was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table, and I think he should apologise.” Trump, true to character, said he has no intention of doing so.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie called it “another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024.”

Providing context for these criticisms, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, told the New York Times last week, “Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country. He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties”.

To Greenblatt, the possibility that “any serious contender for higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and spending time is appalling”.

Trump has received such criticisms before and brushed them off unscathed. Notably, in 2016, he was widely pressured to abjure the endorsement he received from KKK leader David Duke. He refused to do so and was elected president, nonetheless.

But the coming battle for the Republican’s 2024 nomination promises to be very different from 2016. And Trump’s decision to venture beyond dog whistles to personally cosy up to leading antisemites may turn out to be the second nail in his political coffin.

The first came a month ago when the expected Republican midterm election wave landed as merely a trickle, with the Democrats holding the Senate and Republicans achieving a scant majority in the House. Many placed the blame squarely on Trump for promoting the candidacy of election-denying extremists in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Arizona. These concerns were reinforced this week when Democrat Raphael Warnock won re-election over Herschel Walker, a poor-performing Trump promoted candidate, in the Georgia Senate runoff.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, told a Wisconsin news outlet the Republicans have “Trump hangover … he’s a drag on our races”. Retiring senator Patrick Toomey, also a Republican, told the Washington Post, “[Trump’s] influence was unhelpful to the party and to its prospects”.

Two weeks after the election, the Republican Jewish Coalition held its convention in Las Vegas where, as Politico headlined it, “2024 Republican rivals put Trump on notice.” Among those rivals were Christie, Pence, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the last widely considered Trump’s most formidable competitor.

Christie pointedly told those assembled that for Republicans to win elections, they can’t simply “go on Fox News or send tweets”. In a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s persistent fixation on the 2020 election, Pompeo said of the midterms that “the American people did not want to look back, they wanted to move forward”.

As if to underscore Pompeo’s point, this week Trump insanely called for the “termination” of the US Constitution so that the 2020 election could be overturned, thereby returning him to office. 

Commenting on Trump’s troubles, Sununu said the former president has weaker financial support and less support within the party than in the past, concluding, “There’s opportunity there. That political weakness is blood in the water for some folks.”

These prospective candidates were not in Las Vegas just to make speeches and criticise Trump. They were there to rub elbows and press the flesh of some of the party’s most influential donors, ultra-rich Jewish Republicans who have cleaved to Trump for the Abraham Accords and his strong alliance with the recently re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Right.

Now, the Ye-Fuentes-Yiannopoulos dinner is putting a crack in those allegiances with “Jews who previously supported Trump peeling away,” Binyamin Cohen wrote in the Forward, calling the dinner “a breaking point.”

The New York Times agreed, concluding that former supporters who had previously looked past Trump’s transgressive behaviour “are now drawing a line”.

According to Times of Israel, the Zionist Organisation of America, a right-wing group that recently honoured Trump, has now condemned him for “dining with Jew-haters” and helping “legitimise and mainstream antisemitism.”

Trump’s dinner has been called out by such once dyed-in-the-wool supporters as former ambassador to Israel David Friedman and former antisemitism envoy Elan Carr.

What has not yet been reported is what is going on behind the scenes among Trump’s rivals and the donors they glad-handed so recently in Vegas. But the conversations are not hard to imagine: "You can have the policy outcomes without platforming antisemites. You can have an ironclad alliance with Israel and expansion of the Abraham Accords without promoting the most hateful and violent elements in American society."

In light of the numerous court cases and investigations swirling around Trump, the unprecedented rise in hate speech on Twitter under Elon Musk, and the continuing wave of violence sweeping America, such pleas may fall on receptive ears.

So much of power politics goes on behind closed doors: big donors playing candidates against each other to gain the influence, candidates selling their souls for a “mess of pottage” that often amounts to millions.

What we do know is that Trump has doubled down on his commitment to the far Right. He dubiously claimed on his Truth Social platform that “I do not know Nick Fuentes”, according to the Guardian fearing that criticising Ye or Fuentes “might antagonise a devoted part of his base”.

Republican donors and candidates alike will be confident the extremist element of the party’s base will support whichever candidate the party puts on the ballot in the 2024 general election. This was amply demonstrated by the numerous victories of non-MAGA Republicans in the midterms.

The task of Trump’s rivals is to unite in a manner they failed to do in 2016 so that Trump’s unwavering support among extremists is not enough to win him the nomination. It just may be that sensible, Israel-loving yet Nazi-fearing members of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Zionist Organisation of America will be the first to provide a compelling impetus for them to do so.

Jews should not need reminding, as President Biden tweeted this week, that “silence is complicity”.  

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Photo: Nick Fuentes speaks in front of flags that say, "America First," at a pro-Trump march in November 2020 (AP/Evan Vucci)