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WITH TRUMP, THE ANTISEMITISM IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE  
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Branko Marcetic
August 22, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism seems to have strangely missed
all of his appointees and allies who associate with a range of
unabashed anti-Jewish bigots. It almost makes you suspect the White
House’s charges of antisemitism are purely cynical. _

,

 

In the midst of Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed crackdown on
antisemitism, one key fact seems to have been overlooked: the
antisemitism is coming from inside the house — the White House, to
be specific.

The Trump administration has gone to extraordinary lengths in what it
has sold to the public as a battle against antisemitism and those who
spread it. It has asserted the right to strip permanent residency from
people over their speech and deport them for writing op-eds, to defund
universities for not cracking down harder on protests and speech, to
treat student protesters like terrorists, including by raiding their
homes, and is threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of
nonprofits over their political views, among other things.

But strangely, this crackdown has often fallen on individuals
who don’t have
[[link removed]] any actual
record
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antisemitic behavior, no small number of them being Jewish
[[link removed]] themselves.
It’s all enough to make you suspect that the actual goal here
isn’t to rid American society of very real
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poisonous bigotry toward Jews, and is more to lazily use them as an
excuse to stifle political speech that Trump officials don’t like.

Something else that adds to those suspicions? The fact that the Trump
administration is filled with people who have proudly associated with
actual, unvarnished antisemites, or engaged in antisemitism of their
own.

For instance, there are at least three
[[link removed]] separate
administration officials who have associated with or praised (or both)
notorious antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes
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Tate
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the latter of whom has lately supplemented his sex trafficking and
misogyny with shocking, open antisemitism
[[link removed]]. One of these
officials, the White House’s liaison to the Department of Homeland
Security, served
[[link removed]] not just on Tate’s
legal defense team but worked as his publicist (while also
enthusiastically attending one of Fuentes’s rallies where the
influencer said calling Trump “a racist only makes me like him
more”).

Speaking of Tate, the only reason he’s now in Florida and not
rotting in jail in Romania — where he had been arrested and charged
with rape and human trafficking last year — is because the Trump
administration had repeatedly
[[link removed]] pressured
[[link removed]] the
Romanian government to release him
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all while Trump allies, including his own eldest son, loudly decried
his “plight.” Tate has boasted
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he is “very close with the Trump family” and is in touch with
Trump’s youngest son, and Tate’s own lawyer all but confirmed
[[link removed]] Trump’s
intervention won him his freedom. Upon returning, Tate was
enthusiastically and personally welcomed back
[[link removed]] by
Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a donor
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longtime personal friend
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Trump.

The Trump administration is filled with people who have proudly
associated with actual, unvarnished antisemites, or engaged in
antisemitism of their own.

Bear in mind who we’re talking about
[[link removed]] here: Tate uses
“Jew” as an insult, believes we were “lied” to about World War
II (meaning the Holocaust) and that the idea the Nazis were bad guys
is a “psyop,” that this supposedly false narrative has been used
to “subvert the consciousness of Western populations into mass
genetic suicide,” and wants to “bring the Nazi salute back,”
which he has personally performed.

What’s particularly hypocritical is that Tate also openly supports
and valorizes Hamas, whom he regards as “the masculine spirit of
resistance” and has refused to condemn. Keen-eyed readers might note
that this is the exact kind of speech that Trump officials regularly
and falsely lob at left-leaning critics of Israel’s war of engaging
in to justify throwing them out of the United States. For Tate,
literally supporting Hamas and being an actual, open antisemite
instead won him a one-way ticket back into it.

Incredibly, Tate isn’t the only open antisemite whose entry into the
country the Trump administration has facilitated. One of the white
Afrikaners that Trump decided should be allowed into the United States
as “refugees” has, just two years ago, posted
[[link removed]] on
X that Jews were “untrustworthy” and a “dangerous group” who
were “not Gods chosen.” This somehow slipped past a Department of
Homeland Security that now claims to prescreen
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social media accounts of any foreigner entering the country for
antisemitic content.

But back to the people serving in the Trump administration. Those same
three Trump officials have also effusively praised and worked for the
legal defense of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a laughable figure whose
ridiculousness — he gave himself Adolf Hitler’s haircut and
mustache — shouldn’t overshadow his racism: Hale-Cusanelli told
his coworkers that “Hitler should have finished the job,” harassed
and threatened a Jewish man in his home state of New Jersey, and
posted a video complaining about a “Hasidic Jewish invasion” of
the state, comparing orthodox Jews to a “plague of locusts.”
Fortunately for Hale-Cusanelli, none of these repellent views
prevented him from being let into
[[link removed]] Trump’s
personal New Jersey golf club, where the president personally praised
him and everyone in attendance as “amazing patriots.”

No less than the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, appeared eight times
on the podcast of a guy who posted
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photo of himself smiling and holding _Mein Kampf_ with the comment,
“Visionary leadership,” who doubts
[[link removed]] if
the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the 6 million killed in the Holocaust
were real, and believes that Americans are “a bunch of people that
are sold out to Jews.” Another official — who was called
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by the right-wing _Jewish Insider_ “a prolific purveyor of
antisemitic conspiracy theories” — has insisted
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the debunked historical accusation
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Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Georgia, raped and killed a
thirteen-year-old, which was used to justify his lynching.

A sixth_ _appointee, state department official Darren Beattie, had
originally been fired
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the first Trump administration after he spoke at a conference popular
with white supremacists, speaking on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow,
a guy who publishes arguments
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Jewish judges are forcing racial integration and immigration on
Americans. (Incidentally, Trump’s justice department got in hot
water in his first term for sending out
[[link removed]] one
of these antisemitic posts from Brimelow’s outfit). It’s true that
Beattie is Jewish, but the Trump administration and his allies have
long made clear
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regard Jews who are critical of Israel as targets of their supposed
antisemitism purge.

There’s also a seventh one: Sebastian Gorka, whose ties to and
support for antisemitic groups in Hungary didn’t stop him from
serving under Trump in his first term, or from returning for the
second to serve as a national security advisor to the president. In no
particular order, Gorka: cofounded
[[link removed]] a
political party with former members of the openly antisemitic Jobbik
party, with whose members he once associated; backed
[[link removed]] Jobbik’s
creation of a paramilitary militia riddled with antisemites and
objected to it being banned; wrote
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for a newspaper notorious for publishing Holocaust deniers and other
antisemites; and is a sworn, lifelong member
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the modern-day successor organization of a Nazi-collaborating
nationalist group responsible for slaughtering Jews in World War II,
to the point that he proudly wore its medal to Trump’s inaugural
ball in 2017.

An eighth Trump appointee, National Counterterrorism Center head Joe
Kent, went on
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show of a neo-Nazi Youtuber and is also associated
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Fuentes, to the point of once floating
[[link removed]] having
the white supremacist influencer assist with his social media
strategy. When people call Fuentes an antisemite and a white
supremacist, by the way, they are not being hyperbolic: he has said
[[link removed]] that Hitler
was “really fucking cool” and “awesome,” that
[[link removed]] “all I
want” is a “total Aryan victory,” and that he wants
[[link removed]] Jews
to be killed in a “holy war,” because it’s “a problem that the
people that are running your banks, that are making the movies your
children watch … believe all Christians must die.”

Trump had endorsed and supported Kent’s earlier Congressional runs,
just as Trump had last year supported
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early and effusively, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark
Robinson — a man who called
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a “black Nazi,” repeatedly denied
[[link removed]] the
Holocaust, and had a habit of approvingly quoting Hitler, who he said
he would have preferred to be the US president instead of Barack
Obama.

Then there’s Elon Musk. He and Trump may have had a falling out, but
for a long time the two were as close
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with Trump virtually tying himself to the billionaire megadonor. Musk
has a long history
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around antisemitism, including telling
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poster who claimed “western Jewish populations” were flooding
their countries with “hordes of minorities” that he was saying
“the actual truth,” and, of course, doing
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honest-to-God Heil-Hitler salute at Trump’s inauguration. It’s
worth noting that while some
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tried to play off Musk’s gesture as a misinterpreted “awkward
gesture,” white supremacists themselves were well aware of what they
saw.

“It wasn’t even like a, like a subtle, like a wave,” Fuentes
giddily told
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followers afterwards. “That was a straight-up, like, Sieg Heil,
like, loving-Hitler energy.”

It is important to be really clear about what all of these antisemites
linked to Trump and the people around him have been accused of. It’s
not that they used outdated language that we now think of as
offensive, said things that _could_ be construed as antisemitic,
made remarks long ago that they have since disavowed, or criticized
Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians in ways that are now
cynically being redefined as antisemitic. No, they have
said _explicitly, unambiguously antisemitic things_, recently, often
on video, and are frequently open and unembarrassed about their
bigotry toward Jews.

The standard seems to be that open, undisguised antisemitism is just
fine — as long as you’re a political ally, and as long as you
don’t criticize the actions of the Israeli government.

And that’s all before we get to the president himself, who, besides
all of the associations above, has even longer history
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remarks and behavior that, if his administration was serious about its
crackdown on antisemitism, would get him fired from his own
presidency. That includes things like keeping
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collection of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed, or his
statement that “the only kind of people I want counting my money are
short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

But to simplify things, let’s just stick to incidents in the recent
past. Like when Trump hosted
[[link removed]] Fuentes
and Kanye West, then in the middle of a spree of public antisemitic
behavior, for a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Or the many times
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for not being “appreciative” enough of Israel. Or the time he
preemptively blamed
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voters for potentially losing the election. Or a month ago when
he referred
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greedy money-lenders as “shylocks.”

It’s tempting to say that the Trump administration is failing by its
own standards at checking the spread of antisemitism. But that
wouldn’t really be accurate. That’s because the Trump
administration’s standard seems to be that open, undisguised
antisemitism is just fine — as long as you’re a political ally,
and as long as you don’t criticize the actions of the Israeli
government.

This is the fruit of what I warned
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year ago was shaping up into a new form of McCarthyism, which drew on
the wildly successful British model that destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s
Labour leadership and ultimately purged the Left from the party. That
playbook involved redefining antisemitism as criticism of Israeli
policy and aggressively going after anyone who violated the new speech
codes, even if they were Jewish themselves
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But give Trump and his allies some credit for innovating: they’re
the ones who added making an alliance with outright antisemites to
this tried-and-true formula.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

_Jacobin [[link removed]] is a leading voice of the American
left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and
culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000
subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.
Subscribe [[link removed]] to Jacobin magazine._

* anti-Semitism
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* Donald Trump
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