Since that surreal night in 2016 when Trump first won the US presidency, violently rending the fabric of reality as we all knew it, quite a bit has changed. Back then, I lay there in Washington DC in the early hours – I was in town for a history conference – and was utterly poleaxed. A child of the post-Cold War West, it was the first time in my life that a political event had a physical and mental effect on me, causing nightmares, sweats, fear.
This time, I barely felt a thing when I saw that Trump had won. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, that first victory back in 2016 was also seismic for its numbing, cynicism-enhancing effect, teaching well that anything could happen, even in America. Why be surprised, or have hopes, or expect better?
But I also feel differently today – by which I mean less – for other reasons. First, the options on the table. Back in 2016, Hillary seemed so palpably the better choice. Intelligent, competent, hard-working, shrewd, pro-Israel and therefore moral enough: a bastion of the kind of America that I had grown up to expect. Trump was an insult next to her. What did the choice of this uncontrolled loudmouth, possibly criminal bozo reality TV star over her say about the mental abilities of American voters?
Today, facing the extremist-panderer Kamala Harris and the ceasefire-demanding Walz, the choice may indicate something else. If Trump grossly mismanaged Covid, then Biden – in having to cater to the kinds of people produced by the mass social justice movement – mismanaged society and culture so extremely that antisemitism on his watch has become worse in America’s biggest cities than in the Islamist-influenced badlands of Europe. But the splurging antisemitism that has so appalled and sickened good people the West over is the tip of a vast berg made of rotten, DEI-infused ideas, all encouraged by post-Obama Democrats. Harris would have made all this worse.
And so, to the nub of the question. Is Trump’s win good or bad for the Jews? As an (almost) anyone-but-Trump person, it pains me to to say it, but as the unprecedented numbers of American Jews who voted for him presumably also think, he is better, at least for now, in comparison with Harris-Walz. Better in two main contexts: daily life in America (leaving aside the increasing likelihood of mass shootings under an emboldened gun lobby and the grim danger to women that will continue without a federal guarantee of abortion rights), and better for Israel and Middle Eastern security. Trump, unlike Harris, seems to get, or at least pay lip service to, the truth that there are very “bad guys” backed by Iran that need to be taken on and defeated.
October 7 changed everything. The betrayal by the Democrats of their loyal Jewish voters has been so severe since then that their loyalty finally caved. Of course there remain plenty of American Jewish peaceniks more animated by what Israel “does to” Palestinians than the safety of their homeland. But for many, including former peaceniks, the sight of pro-Hamas and Hezbollah placards, virulently antisemitic chants and anti-Zionist propaganda masquerading as serious curricular content at Ivy League universities has poisoned the chalice. In Chicago today “pro-Palestine” protesters burned the Israeli flag, as if it were Tehran or Saanaa. Meanwhile, Democrats offer Islamophobia Week and think that “sanity” is to try to intimidate Israel into downing arms against those who want them all dead.
Alan Dershowitz summed up the situation well. In a video clip, he said: “I can’t vote for you, Kamala Harris. I’m sorry. I’m a Democrat, all my life. I can’t bring myself to vote for you, at least now, based on what I’ve now seen.” He was referring to Harris’s response to a protester at a speech at the University of Wisconsin who disrupted her demanding attention be paid to Israel’s “genocide”. “What he’s talking about is real, it’s real, and I respect his voice” she said as he was ushered out by security. For Dershowitz and others a potential President happy to call “real” accusations right out of the blood libel was not tolerable.
All this is cultural - it’s about what happens on the streets, workplaces, campuses. It’s about what level of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine activism is normalised as “free speech” (sporting symbols of watermelons, Palestine flag pins, pendants of Israel redrawn in Palestinian flag colours) — even celebrated. Under Trump, it seems likely that this stuff at least won’t be coddled from on-high for fear of alienating vicious anti-Israel voters and party power-brokers.
But there are two obvious ways in which Trump may not be “good” for Jews. That so many have been driven out of fear and loathing into abandoning the core political values that have defined them for generations betokens much fragmentation and splintering, many dark nights of the soul, and general misery at how bad things are. Many Jews, including yours truly, are disgusted that the sheer evil countenanced and in some cases encouraged by the post-Obama Democrats have forced us to look stonily, but calmly, ahead as Trump romps to victory. It is a degradation of our sense of self that we must look to this utter thug, megalomaniac, possible dictator as the better of two evils. Finally, I had little faith in Harris’s foreign policy in and beyond the Middle East, but if Trump’s erratic style leads to the crushing of Nato, Europe may become susceptible again to Russian dominion, unleashing other very bad actors. Whether this would be worse for the Jews in particular is unclear, but it would be worse for the world.
