Michelle Goldberg
April 28, 2025
Opinion

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 U.S. 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, Florida, by the Islamist Omar Mateen. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT 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 transgender rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “LGBT” in it.

Trump’s treatment of LGBT 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 Adolf Hitler.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, once said the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank. Just last month Leo Terrell, the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force, shared a social media post by a prominent neo-Nazi gloating that Trump had the power to take away Sen. Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card.” Trump, of course, dined with Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Yet I’ve been astonished to learn that some people believe that when the administration attacks academia for its purported antisemitism, it’s acting in good faith. Speaking on CNBC last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, cheered Trump’s attempt to exercise political control over Harvard University, saying, “It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in.” In a shocking interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism under President Joe Biden, praised Trump’s assaults on academia and its attempts to deport some pro-Palestinian activists. While in some cases she thinks the administration has gone overboard, she suggested that those who don’t give the president credit for standing up for Jews suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.”

It seems to me that there’s another sort of derangement at play here, rooted in the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism. There have certainly been incidents of crude anti-Jewish bigotry in the protests that followed Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But too many backers of Israel can’t seem to imagine a reason besides antisemitic animus for impassioned opposition to Israel’s merciless war on the Gaza Strip. This leads them to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and, in turn, to rationalize away Trump’s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive redoubts.

As I write this, Israel has been blocking food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza for more than 50 days. The U.N. World Food Program has delivered its last stocks of food to Gaza’s soup kitchens, which will shortly run out of supplies. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said this month. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”

There are a couple of ways to interpret his words. One is that they’re true. The other is that, as a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign minister said, Guterres is “spreading slander against Israel,” just like all the protesters, many of them Jewish, now being punished at the administration’s behest. In this view, escalating opposition to Israel can be understood only as the product of a kind of antisemitic conspiracy, one so vast and entrenched that extreme measures might be needed to thwart it. Many Jews, said Lipstadt, “disappointed by how universities have behaved since Oct. 7,” are relieved to see “a strong — to use Passover terminology — a strong hand being used.” In the Exodus narrative, the “strong hand” belongs to God. In Lipstadt’s analogy, then, Trump is an agent of the divine.

It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking. But even Jews who continue to delight in Trump’s animosity toward Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they’re making. In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads, gutter antisemitism is often considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging. Holocaust denial has started cropping up on major podcasts including Tucker Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s. A decade ago, it served Trump to align himself with gay rights; now his administration either bans or discourages the mere use of the word “gay” or the abbreviation “LGBT.” I’m not sure why anyone, let alone a scholar of the Holocaust, thinks Jews will fare better.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michelle Goldberg/Jamie Lee Taete
c. 2025 The New York Times Company