Opinion | I Cant Believe Anyone Thinks Trump Actually Cares About Antisemitism
About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights.This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into American politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.
In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by the Islamist Omar Mateen.“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.
citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said.A month later he unveiled his proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants, which would exclude anyone who failed to “embrace a tolerant American society.”It should have been clear at the time that Trump’s putative concern for the safety of sexual minorities was simply a convenient wedge to try to divide the Democratic coalition.
During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections.Last year he used a growing backlash to trans rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “L.G.B.T.” in it.Trump’s treatment of L.G.B.T.
people should have been a lesson to anyone tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously, when it is screamingly obvious that it’s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions.Trump and his allies, after all, have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree.
Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X.(My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) Robert F.
Kennedy ...