Trump will make the lives of American Jews better, but they won’t thank him for it

Only Jews cling to the idea that because their families benefited from immigrating to America a century ago, the whole world should get the same chance now. Yet when you speak to Jewish Americans, they complain, as all Americans do, about the breakdown of the southern border and the Biden-Harris administration’s tolerance for illegal immigration and the rise in brutal crimes committed by immigrants both legal and illegal.

This doublespeak has become habitual, if not pathological. We hear it whenever Jews discuss that other sacred cow of upward mobility, higher education.

For decades, Jewish donors poured millions into Ivy League schools. They kept sending the cheques when the liberal arts turned anti-liberal and the humanities lost their humanity. Jewish donors underwrote admissions policies that actively discriminated against Jews, Indians, Chinese and other try-hard minorities.

The donors and the major Jewish institutions even looked the other way when the “social justice” movements attacked the Jews and Israel in the year of St. George Floyd. Only after the October 7 massacres and the campus-wide celebrations it inspired did the majority of Jewish Americans accept that the university, the institution that gave them the keys to the middle-class kingdom, was training their enemies.

Luckily for Jewish Americans, the top American universities don’t just teach hatred of Jews as capitalists and colonialists. They teach hatred of America, the Great Satan of global capitalism and the most successful colonialist society of all.

Sufferance being the badge of our tribe, the Jews are more habituated to accepting the unacceptable than the average American is. Americans are deeply patriotic and deeply averse to elitism. Donald Trump’s promise to restore the American university to its traditional function, training the experts of tomorrow in value-neutral technocracy, struck a chord in November. Expect him to deliver.

Trump and the people around him recognise that while the university should be producing knowledge and expertise, it mostly produces dim Democratic snobs. The new administration intends to take the culture war into the machinery of government: the federal bureaucracy.

The universities are thoroughly bureaucratised. Even the wealthiest of them takes millions of dollars in federal subsidies. That means they are bound by federal law.

In 2019, the first Trump administration recognised that the universities had turned against the Jews. An Executive Order extended Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964) to cover Jews (and Sikhs, interestingly enough). The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education did everything it could to avoid implementation – until the explosion of Islamo-communist incitement and violence against Jews on campus after October 7, 2023 showed that the Jews’ problem was in fact every American’s problem.

The second Trump administration will pursue anti-Jewish racism on campus through Title VI prosecutions. The Department of Education, a Democratic fiefdom that presides over mounting illiteracy, is part of the problem. This is America, not Europe. If it’s broken, you don’t fix it. You go to court or you buy a new one.

Jewish Americans will benefit enormously from the cleaning of the stables of higher education, from the restoration of meritocracy, and from a bonfire of red tape. Most of them are unlikely to thank Trump and the Republicans. But they will like the results anyway.

The same goes in foreign affairs. The majority of American Jews just voted for the party that wants to impose a Palestinian state on Israel. In December, the Democrats waived another $10 billion worth of sanctions on Iran, which has done its best to destroy the Jewish state. Meanwhile, Jewish Americans complain that America’s institutions, all of them commandeered by the Democrats, have turned against them. Again with the doublethink.

Fortunately for Jewish Americans, the incoming administration will back Israel. Trump will seek to avoid open war with Iran but he will give Israel the tools to finish the job.

The Democrats actively opposed all of Israel’s successful post-October 7 initiatives. Trump actively endorsed them all. He promises there will be “all hell to pay” if the remaining hostages are not returned. He has Jewish grandchildren, after all. What a fascist!

The Democrats did nothing to develop the Abraham Accords for three years. The Abraham Accords were a Republican success, largely achieved by Trump bypassing the State Department. The affront to Democratic pride trumped the national interest.

Biden came in condemning Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” — then begged Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS) to turn on the oil taps. Of course MbS refused. After October 7, the administration suddenly pressed the Saudis to strike a deal with Israel and for a Palestinian state to be part of it. Of course MbS is waiting for Trump’s return.

An Israeli-Saudi peace deal is a real possibility in 2025. It is also possible that this deal will not be predicated on a Palestinian state, so it could actually get through the Knesset. This would not be possible had Kamala Harris won. Most American Jews will pretend not to notice that, even as they celebrate the deal.

The new Republican administration will make Jews more secure in America and Israel more secure among the nations. The knock-on effects, incidentally, will include loud disapproval of countries whose governments ignore incitement and violence against Jews, Britain included. No one will thank Trump for that, either.