Donald Trump has a message for American Jews, more than 70% of whom have voted Democratic in the last two elections: “If you vote for a Democrat, you’re very, very disloyal to Israel and to the Jewish people.”
Again, we are talking about American Jews, not Israelis. But to Trump, his support for Israel is supposed to automatically translate to monolithic support from American Jews, no matter what else he does. But that’s not the way Jewish people see it.
”He is reflecting a concept of Jewish Americans as single-issue voters around Israel, which we’re not; that we’re uniformly hawkish on these issues, which we’re not,” J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami told The Washington Post. “In reality, what matters most to us are the exact values that the president is spending his term trashing. We care about equality and justice, and we embrace the notion that this is a nation of immigrants and opportunity for all.”
That’s why we see dozens of Jews being arrested protesting ICE. It’s why Trump got just 23% of Jewish votes in 2016 and Republicans got just 17% of the 2018 vote. And in fact, Jews are more likely than Christians to say Trump favors Israelis too much. In 2018, according to J Street polling, the top two voting issues for American Jews were health care and gun violence. Just 4% listed Israel as one of their top two issues. According to another poll, in 2019, 45% of Jews disapprove strongly of Trump’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations, with another 14% disapproving somewhat, and 65% said that the status of Jews in the United States is less secure than a year ago.
And here’s Trump using the anti-Semitic trope of Jews being loyal to Israel above all to try to pressure them into supporting him. It’s disgusting. It is, as Adam Serwer tweeted, yet another sign that “Trump has more positive feelings towards Jews than Latinos or black people or Muslims but like other non-white Christian groups, he thinks Jews are conditionally American.” And it’s not going to work to persuade Jews to support him, but it just might bump up the anti-Semitism level among his base.