Until President Trump delivered his first address to Congress last week, his handling of the very serious issue of anti-Semitism had been mostly disappointing. At first glance, this seems odd. Trump is a native of New York City, home to the nation's largest Jewish community, and so is no stranger to it. On the contrary, his daughter Ivanka, as is well known, married a Jew (Jared Kushner) and converted to Judaism, and all the indications are that Donald Trump was very supportive of her in doing so. Trump has, it seems, no record of animus toward Jews whatsoever, which makes his maladroit comments on anti-Semitism and things related to it more than a little vexing.
The origins of Trump's problem here has to do with his presidential campaign, where he was slow to disavow support from bigots, most notably Louisiana's David Duke, who is a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Trump's populist/nativist message during the campaign, which was reflected in his fondness for the phrase “America First,” only made matters worse. That particular slogan was first made popular during the early 1940's by an organization of the same name opposed to American entry into World War II. The group's most famous spokesman was the famed aviator and leading Isolationist Charles Lindbergh. In his speeches against intervention then, Lindbergh increasingly blamed not just the Roosevelt administration and the British government, but also the American Jewish community for pushing the nation to confront Nazi Germany. Lindbergh's address in Des Moines, Iowa during the fall of 1941 was probably the single most notorious for its anti-Semitic tone and substance. (He claimed, among other things, that Jews dominated the American media and were using that power to lead the country into war at a time when less than 3% of American newspaper publishers were Jewish.) Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party's 1940 presidential nominee, who had earlier defended Lindbergh's right to speak against FDR's foreign policies, called the speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.” More than any other single person, Lindbergh discredited the reputation of the phrase “America First,” which dropped out of the nation's political vocabulary after Pearl Harbor until the phrase finally resurfaced due to Donald Trump's use of it during his presidential campaign.
Once President, Trump compounded those earlier mistakes by issuing an official statement in January honoring International Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention the six million Jews who were killed. Instead, the statement referred to the victims of the Holocaust in more general terms, such as “those who died” and talked about “the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.” While it is true that not everyone killed during the Holocaust was Jewish, it is also true that the overwhelming majority of its victims were Jewish, and that killing Jews was the central Nazi objective in that historical episode. What made the omission especially disturbing is that there are vocal anti-Semites who persist in trying to deny the historical reality of the Holocaust, and so any official presidential statement that leaves out a mention of the Jews as victims has the potential to encourage that wrongheaded view.
And then there is the matter of the increase in anti-Semitic threats and acts of vandalism around the country since Donald Trump's Inauguration on January 20th. Among the most prominent targets have been a Jewish cemetery in University City, Missouri, which was seriously vandalized, and Jewish community centers around the country, which have received threats. Trump's response, when asked during a press conference why he had not been more outspoken about that kind of activity, was to attack the question as an insult and order the journalist (who works for a Jewish publication) to sit down. That kind of angry response, made so publicly, also has the potential to fan the flames of anti-Semitism.
Criticism of Trump's handling of that query and of his other, earlier statements and actions listed above, prompted a change beginning on February 21st. During a visit to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, President Trump spoke of the need to fight hatred “in all of its very ugly forms,” and then went on to denounce the recent anti-Semitic threats against Jewish community centers as “horrible” and “painful.” Next came Trump's unequivocal denunciation of those threats early in his first address to Congress on February 28th. His remarks there reassured many that Trump was beginning to understand the harmful power of maladroit statements and actions by him in this area, especially now that he is the President. Today's (March 7) statement by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer amplifying Trump's condemnation of anti-Semitism in his speech to Congress is another sign of progress.
Trump's poor handling of the anti-Semitism issue up until last week reflects, it seems, bad advice from some of his of aides, poor judgment on his part, and, above all, inexperience with holding elective office. That last point is a key one. Trump is the first American president to come to the office from a career spent entirely in the private sector. While that background can provide skills of real use in serving as president, it tends to leave one poorly prepared to understand the different consequences that can follow from what ones says as a public official rather than as a private citizen. That drawback need not be a permanent one. Those who come to prominent public office from private life can learn to speak differently. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg affords an outstanding example. When he first ran for mayor after a very successful career in business, Bloomberg's public statements sometimes grated on the ears of city residents. What he lacked at first was the kind of awareness of the importance of saying something the right way, a skill that most successful career politicians develop long before they reach high office. Trump could learn from Bloomberg's example, and perhaps from Bloomberg himself, if the president were to reach out to him for advice. One can only hope that President Trump learns to speak and deal with the issue of anti-Semitism in a consistently intelligent and thoughtful way, lest he contribute, however unwittingly, to anti-Jewish thoughts and deeds.