This Is Who Trump Always Was

The man who dined with anti-Semites last week is the same man who ran for president in 2016. Many just didn’t want to see it.

Every job has its pros and cons. The good part about reporting on anti-Semitism is that you get to say “I told you so” a lot. The bad part about reporting on anti-Semitism is that you get to say “I told you so” a lot.

In September 2016, I wrote an essay entitled “Why a Vote for Trump Is a Vote for Mainstreaming Anti-Semitism.” The argument was less that Donald Trump personally despised Jews—that is a more complicated discussion—but rather that his campaign was “dependent on a rabid support base that does.” Because Trump had repelled many traditional Republican political professionals, he was unusually reliant on an enthusiastic fringe of online extremists to get his message out, which meant that the more power he amassed, the more influence they would attain. It was clear, I concluded six years ago, that electing Trump would not elevate just him, but his entire unfortunate entourage, into public life.

Last Tuesday, the same Donald Trump dined with two avowed anti-Semites, the rapper Kanye “Ye” West and neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes, at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The former president has since issued many statements about the meeting, both through official channels and his social-media app, Truth Social. None condemned the anti-Jewish ideology of his companions.

The incident has alarmed even some of Trump’s staunchest supporters, and drawn wide-ranging condemnation from figures as varied as Senator Marco Rubio, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” one longtime Trump ally told the New York Times. “And this scares me.” Like many Jews, I’m glad to hear rebukes from Republican officials and activists. But I’m also shocked that they are shocked. Trump’s unrepentant rendezvous with racists was many things, but it was not surprising. After all, as I noted back in 2016, he and his allies have been boosting bigots from the fever swamp ever since Trump entered politics.

Just look back at his campaign for the presidency, which was riddled with these awkward imbroglios. In July 2016, Trump tweeted a meme declaring that Hillary Clinton was “the most corrupt candidate ever”—with those words emblazoned over a six-pointed Jewish star superimposed on a pile of money. The meme had previously been popularized on a neo-Nazi website. Shortly before the election, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier white-supremacist academic, who has argued that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western countries, pumping the marginal malcontent into the political mainstream. Trump’s future national security adviser General Michael Flynn similarly retweeted an anti-Semitic message, foreshadowing his own descent into conspiracism over the coming years.

For a traditional politician, these incidents would have provided easy opportunities to disavow the fanatical fringe and distance themselves from its denizens. But Trump is constitutionally incapable of condemning those who praise him, which in practice means that he repeatedly launders his ugliest sycophants into the nation’s political discourse. This is why he couldn’t restrain himself from declaring that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville. And it’s why he has been unwilling to explicitly reject the worldview of his white-supremacist dinner guest, Nick Fuentes, who marched in that racist rally.

In other words, like so much related to anti-Semitism today—from Ye’s conspiracy theories to far-right attacks on American Jews—Trump’s elevation of anti-Jewish actors is not actually new; people are just starting to notice it. Yesterday’s Trump “mistakes” are tomorrow’s Trump guest list. There is a straight line from the 2016 campaign to the 2022 dinner.

It would be comforting to think that some of Trump’s enablers have finally learned this lesson. But despite the condemnations, that’s far from clear.

In the aftermath of Trump’s dinner, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared: “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-Semitism or white supremacy. Anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected President.” As a general rule, whenever a politician tells you that there is “no room” in their movement for X, that means there currently is room for X, which is why they were compelled to condemn it. And in this case, the contradiction is particularly apparent—after all, Donald Trump was already elected president. If McConnell truly believes what he is saying, then he is in denial about the reality of his own party.

Indeed, Republicans in Congress are poised not to disempower the fellow travelers of anti-Semites, but to promote them. In his campaign to become the next Speaker of the House, Congressman Kevin McCarthy promised to reinstate Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to prestigious committee posts, after she was stripped of them in the last Congress. Not only has Greene shared conspiracy theories about “Zionist supremacists” who have “schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation,” approvingly cited Louis Farrakhan, and blamed forest fires on Rothschild-controlled space lasers, but she spoke alongside Fuentes in February at a white-nationalist conference he organized, where they gleefully shook hands.

Today, Greene claims to reject his ideology, while offering no explanation as to how she was so easily bamboozled by Fuentes, or whether she has the judgment to serve in Congress, let alone be trusted with its most important work. Moreover, because Republicans have such a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, they have become even more reliant on extreme voices like hers in order to govern. A party that is in thrall to such individuals is not one that will be full-throatedly rejecting anti-Semitism in its ranks anytime soon. As I warned would happen in 2016, these are the people who rode to power on Trump’s coattails, and now that they have been mainstreamed, they are not going anywhere.

I wish I could claim some special credit for predicting this turn of events. But the truth is, it didn’t take foresight or even educated guesswork to perceive that Trump would activate the ugliest underbelly of American politics. It just took seeing what was already in front of your face.

The ancient rabbinic moral tract Ethics of the Fathers contains the following proverb: “What is the right path that a person should pursue? One that sees the nolad.” There are many interpretations of this word, but the one I find compelling is that it refers to understanding the inevitable consequences of actions, like the growth of a baby into an adult. To be wise is to be able to see where things are going—to grasp the results by looking at the roots.

The children of 2016 are all grown up, and this is the world Trump made for them.