Trump administration's hypocrisy that it's fighting antisemitism

The Trump administration has touted its controversial moves to punish Columbia University for tolerating aggressive pro-Palestinian protests on campus and to deport Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding immigrant prominently involved in those protests, as evidence of its commitment to combating antisemitism. While these steps have rightly raised free speech concerns, the hypocrisy of the administration’s professed vigilance against anti-Jewish bigotry is also worth noting, given its disturbing friendliness to some odious Jew-haters on the right.

The most recent example involves an actual administration official, Pentagon deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson. Wilson, 26, previously worked on Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and at a leading pro-Trump think tank. Earlier this month, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other media outlets published reports on Wilson’s shocking history of antisemitic social media posts.

In 2023 and 2024, Wilson posted attacks on Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in Georgia in 1915 after being convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in a trial widely regarded as marred by grotesque antisemitism; Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986. Claims that Frank was guilty and that the crime was a ritual murder have circulated widely on the antisemitic fringe.

Other Wilson posts have promoted Christian nationalism and praised Germany’s far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party, whose rhetoric has flirted with Nazi apologism and neo-Nazi slogans. She has even mocked Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for going to Columbia University to show support for Jewish students who said the pro-Palestinian protests were rife with anti-Jewish harassment.

Several conservative commentators have expressed dismay at Wilson’s bigotry and called for her firing. Neither the Department of Defense nor the White House acknowledged these concerns.

Another controversy erupted around reports that administration officials, including Trump special envoy Richard Grenell, intervened on behalf of social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who are facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania, to secure their return to the United States pending trial. Andrew Tate, whose former attorney and outspoken admirer Paul Ingrassia is currently the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, is notorious primarily for his toxic misogyny. But he has peddled equally toxic antisemitism, praising Hamas for its "masculine spirit of resistance" and questioning World War II narratives that portray the Nazis as villains.

None of this should be surprising, considering that Trump’s dalliance with far-right antisemites goes back to his 2016 campaign when a substantial contingent of his online troops came from the racist "alternative right." Since then, that loathsome movement has largely vanished from the scene, but its hateful ideology has infiltrated the more mainstream right to an alarming degree: Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host and now a hugely popular podcaster who played a prominent role in Trump’s presidential campaign last year, has been peddling barely veiled white nationalism as well as antisemitic tropes that portray Jews as interlopers with no loyalty to America. He has also platformed antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

Trump himself claims to be a staunch supporter of Israel and Jews — but he has also repeatedly singled out Jews for particularly nasty attacks, essentially accusing them of being bad Jews. This week, he remarked that New York Sen. Chuck Schumer  was "not Jewish anymore" and had become "a Palestinian." In 2022, Trump hosted noted antisemites Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left is a real problem. But American Jews are ill-served by false friends like the Trump administration.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.