Jonathan Chait writes:

Donald Trump is the most openly anti-Semitic president in American history. There is no close second. While many presidents expressed anti-Semitic beliefs in private, only Trump has done so repeatedly, and usually in public.

If you go through the list of classic anti-Semitic beliefs, Trump has checked off nearly every box:

— Jews are natural negotiators (“I’m a negotiator, like you folks”)
— Jews buy off politicians (“You want to control your own politician”)
— Jews are loyal to Israel more than any other country where they live (in 2019, he described Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to a group of American Jews as “your prime minister.” In 2018 and 2020, he referred to Israel as “your country.”)
— Jews are inbred and selfish (“After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers,” the Washington Post reported, “Trump has muttered that Jews ‘are only in it for themselves’ and ‘stick together’ in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.”)

Trump’s rhetoric has often employed anti-Semitic tropes, such as his 2016 tweet, borrowed from a white supremacist, using a Star of David to label Hillary Clinton as “corrupt” or his ad attacking “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” over images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein, all of whom happen to be Jewish. [Continue reading…]