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Last Friday, Trump praised Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for spinelessly acquiescing to Trump’s spending priorities. Earlier in the week, though, he attacked Schumer with a disgusting antisemitic and anti-Palestinian smear.
“Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned,” Trump spewed. “He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” (Watch below.)
Chuck Schumer was born Jewish and remains Jewish. Given this easily provable fact, it’s easy to dismiss Trump’s attack as simply bizarre and delusional, especially given the general disgust with Schumer at the moment.
But Trump’s attack wasn’t just random. It was part of the far right’s longstanding, calculated use of antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bigotry to advance its agenda.
The antisemitic tropes Trump is leveraging are less obvious than those about supposed Jewish greed or Jewish bankers (which Republicans use regularly as well). They’re very dangerous, though, in part because they exploit fractures in the Jewish community itself and link antisemitism with anti-Palestinian hate, harming both communities.
Trump, king of the Jews
This is far from the first time that Trump has claimed that Schumer has “become a Palestinian.” It’s an attack line he used regularly during the 2024 campaign, including lying at a rally last August that Schumer has “become a proud member of Hamas.”
In reality, Schumer is a longtime Zionist and enthusiastic supporter of Israel. He has, however, criticized Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of his war on Gaza, which has included horrific human rights violations according to international organizations. Schumer also recently issued a wishy-washy statement halfheartedly condemning the Trump administration’s lawless detention of green card holder and Columbia University pro-Palestinian student protestor Mahmoud Khalil. In an interview with the New York Times that was published yesterday, Schumer said Khalil should not be deported if he had not broken the law, but refused to categorically condemn the detention, instead saying, “I don’t know all the details yet.”
In Trump’s eyes, though, Schumer’s greatest sin is simply that he’s a leader of the opposition to him. Trump has said that Jewish people who oppose him “should have their heads examined.” He’s also suggested that they are “disloyal” to Israel and Judaism. With his smears of Schumer, Trump is following this logic to its ultimate conclusion, claiming that Jewish people who don’t support him or demur from his policies in any way are simply not Jewish.
Trump’s remarks about Schumer channel antisemitism in a couple of ways. First, Trump, a self-proclaimed (but obviously phony) Christian, is claiming to be entitled to decide who is and is not Jewish. He is saying, and not very subtly, that he has the right to rule over a subservient Jewish population — one which cannot contradict him without losing their right to their very identity and selves.
The idea that Christians get to determine what Jews are allowed to say, and who they are allowed to be, is a claim that Jewish people are second-class citizens, and second-class humans. That’s obviously antisemitic.
In addition, in suggesting that Schumer is not a real Jew, Trump is playing on antisemitic tropes about Jewish inauthenticity and artificiality. Jewish people in the diaspora have long been accused not just of disloyalty, but of lacking authentic roots or connection to the nation and themselves. Thus Stalin’s infamous characterization of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.”
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More, Jewish people are often smeared as invaders, sneakily pretending to assimilate even as they undermine the nation from within. The Nazis believed that Jews were an “alien race” who infiltrated and fed off host nations, pretending to be citizens while they orchestrated international conspiracies.
Jews, for antisemites, are deceitful by nature; the fact that you can’t always tell that a Jewish person is Jewish is not because Jewish people just aren’t that different from everyone else. Instead it’s seen as a conspiracy, with Jewish people imitating good Christian volk in order to hide their own agenda — and to hide the fact that they have no real true core.
When Trump accuses Schumer of not being a Jew, then, he’s riffing on tropes which smear all Jewish people as fake or inauthentic. There are no real Jews — except for those given a special dispensation by Christian leaders.
Christian Zionists vs. the diaspora
The idea that Jewish people are disloyal infiltrators betraying the country is extremely dangerous. For instance, the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that Jews are sneakily promoting immigration to subvert white culture, has motivated numerous mass shooters, including a gunman who in 2018 committed the worst antisemitic massacre in US history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
People on the right claimed to be horrified by the Tree of Life shooting. But they have continued to use the same conspiracy theories and talking points to attack progressive Jews and Jews in the diaspora in the name of (Christian) Zionism.
Far right propagandist and Trump ally Steve Bannon made this explicit in an interview in February when he, like Trump, claimed the right to speak for Jews and for Zionism.
“People in Israel gotta understand something,” he said. “The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA.” He added, “the single biggest enemy to the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire: progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding all this stuff.”
For Bannon, as for Trump, American Jews (who tend to vote Democratic) are disloyal simultaneously to America, to MAGA, and to the true Jewishness that is Israel. The right has essentially claimed that Christian Zionists are the real Jews, which conveniently allows them to use antisemitic tropes to smear Jewish people while deflecting accusations of antisemitism. After all, how can you be antisemitic while defending Israel?
These tactics are especially effective, and especially harmful, because a group of rightwing Zionist Jews are eager to cosign them. Rightwing American Jews and Netanyahu himself have been attacking leftwing Jews for some time, using these same tropes of disloyalty and inauthenticity.
Netanyahu has, for example, cosigned antisemitic attacks on billionaire Democratic donor and Holocaust survivor George Soros. Rightwing propagandist Ben Shapiro has claimed that American Jews “are not particularly Jewish in identity.” Rightwing Jewish radio host Sid Rosenberg, while interviewing Donald Trump, said that Kamala Harris’s Jewish husband Doug Emhoff was a “crappy Jew.” And it’s become almost a reflexive cliché among Jewish right-wingers to claim that Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of Israel, is not really Jewish.
Intertwining antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bigotry
Christian Zionists and rightwing Jewish Zionists have coordinated to target Democratic and progressive Jews for antisemitic smears, denying their loyalty and their authenticity. As part of this attack, they’ve also claimed — as Trump does — that American Jewish people are essentially Muslims or Palestinians.
Thus, for Trump, calling Schumer a “Palestinian” functions as both an Islamophobic slur and an antisemitic one. Schumer, for Trump, is a disloyal alien. It’s because Schumer is a Jew that he has no real identity and can be associated with other supposedly disloyal, supposedly racially inferior groups like Palestinians.
These conflations are especially frightening as Trump builds power to attack political enemies and marginalized people. His lawless immigration authorities have been targeting pro-Palestinian protestors. Mahmoud Kahlil, who has a green card and is a legal resident, has been seized and imprisoned without charges, and Trump is promising to escalate similar attacks.
Trump is using antisemitic attacks on progressive Jews to justify targeting Palestinians; he’s using anti-Palestinian rhetoric, bigotry, and smears to target Jewish people. And he’s leveraging the irresponsible antisemitism and anti-Palestinian rhetoric from rightwing Jews (including Netanyahu) to justify his fascist rhetoric and actions and immunize him from charges of antisemitism.
This is why it’s vital to reiterate that these attacks are, in fact, antisemitic. Attacking Schumer’s Jewish identity is an antisemitic attack on Schumer’s Jewish identity. Using “Palestinian” as a slur is bigotry; claiming that Schumer is not Jewish is antisemitic. Trump is not fighting for Jewish people; he is not the defender of Jewish people. He is a fascist bigot. He’s coming for leftists, for Palestinians, and for Jewish people first. There’s a poem about where that ends.
That’s it for today
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