Trump's Crocodile Tears for the Jews

Last week, Donald Trump went on Fox News and took offense on behalf of the Jews. Asked about Vice President Kamala Harris choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, the former president declared: “I think it’s insulting to Jewish people.” Trump’s own running mate, J. D. Vance, expressed similar sentiments at a Philadelphia rally, saying that he “felt bad” for Shapiro, and that “whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody,” the fact “that the vice-presidential race on the Democratic side became so focused on his ethnicity” is “absolutely disgraceful” and “insulting to Americans.”

These claims didn’t come out of nowhere. During the VP selection process, Shapiro faced legitimate criticism over his stances on subjects like school vouchers, but also a campaign by far-left activists to cast the Jewish governor—a sharp critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—as “Genocide Josh,” while ignoring the similar Israel stances of non-Jewish VP contenders such as Walz and Arizona’s Mark Kelly. Shapiro has said that anti-Semitism played no role in his conversations with Harris, and there’s no evidence that it factored into her ultimate decision. Nonetheless, the all-out assault against Shapiro’s prospective candidacy shocked many Jews and outside observers, who saw it as singling out the governor for his Jewish identity and insinuating that Jews secretly serve the Israeli state over America.

But the fact that Shapiro encountered anti-Semitism doesn’t mean that we should take Trump’s sympathy for him at face value—because we also know how Trump treats Jews once they assume leadership in the Democratic Party. “Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian,” the former president recently told supporters in Pennsylvania, unleashing one of his new favorite slurs against the Senate majority leader and highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the nation. “Can you believe it? He’s become a proud member of Hamas.”

What was Schumer’s offense? In March, he called for Israeli voters to replace Netanyahu. But months earlier, Shapiro publicly dubbed Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.” Harris didn’t pick Shapiro, and so Trump today labels her choice as “insulting to Jewish people.” But had she picked Shapiro, Trump would be calling the governor a bad Jew over his strident criticisms of Netanyahu, just as he has derided Schumer. That’s because Trump doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism; he just invokes it for advantage.

Sadly, this approach is not unique to Trump. It’s emblematic of the cynical politics of anti-Semitism today, where many political partisans attend to anti-Jewish prejudice only if it can be pinned on the other team. Otherwise, they either ignore it or make excuses for it.

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