Our Bigots in Chief
Don't memory-hole the Trump/Musk antisemitism
My original plan today was to link to a new NPR story about all of the Trump Administration officials who have close ties to antisemitic extremists. The piece tells a disturbing story about three White House officials who have waded deeply into the sewers of Jew-hate. It really is excellent journalism and you should read the whole thing here.
The irony/hypocrisy is striking since the Trump administration “has used the fight against antisemitism as justification for the deportation of pro-Palestinian student protesters and funding cuts to universities.”
So the reporting about the officials seems especially timely:
There is Paul Ingrassia, the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, who “has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting antisemitism” and white nationalism, including a prominent Holocaust denier. In particular, the story emphasizes Ingrassia’s relationship and public support for neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
There’s Rachel Cauley, the communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, who, like Ingrassia, had ties to a “Nazi sympathizer” named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who was convicted of multiple nonviolent offenses for storming the Capitol on January 6 and was later pardoned by Trump. You might remember his guy:
There is the execrable Ed Martin, who had been nominated to be the US Attorney for DC before Senate Republicans choked on his repulsiveness. NPR notes that: “In August 2024, Martin praised Hale-Cusanelli as an "extraordinary man" and "extraordinary leader" and gave him an award for promoting "God, family and country." (Martin also gave Ingrassia an award immediately after Hale-Cusanelli spoke to the gathering.)
And then there was Kash Patel, the FBI Director (FFS), who “appeared eight separate times on a podcast hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who promotes Holocaust denial. Peters posted a photo of himself holding Hitler's Mein Kampf with the message "visionary leadership.’”
Sounds bad, because it is bad. But this really only scratches the surface doesn’t it, especially when the worst comes from the very top?
Let’s dive back into that, shall we?
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The Real Bigots-in-Chief
Since we are talking about prominent Trumpists who traffic in Jew-hate, how about this guy — who is very much in plain sight? “Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate told The New York Times. “They have reacted accordingly.”
This is from less than two years ago:
Drudge was not exaggerating. In November 2023, a Xitter user posted:
Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
Musk’s response, sent to his 63 million “followers”:
As I wrote back then (“Elon Musk: The Bigot in Full”): This does not require 20,000 words of tortured exegesis. It’s not a critique of Israeli government policy; it shares no deep thoughts about a two-state solution; it is raw, undiluted antisemitism. Musk’s message was unmistakable and his groyper Nazi fans — including Nick Fuentes — absolutely loved it.
As the Daily Mail noted at the time, Musk’s anti-Jewish Xeet followed a depressingly familiar pattern:
Musk has a long history of toying with dog-whistle rhetoric about Jewish people, in particular George Soros, who enraged him in May by selling his Tesla stock.
He has also angered people with his response to the Israel-Hamas war.
In the days after the October 7 Hamas terror attack, Musk was forced to delete a tweet, which recommended an anti-Semitic account and a promoter of debunked videos as reliable sources of information about the attack on Israel.
Indeed, Musk’s history of antisemitism is so long that “the Forward” compiled a lengthy list of his “Nazi quotes” and comments about Jews.”1
And then, there is Trump himself…
For some reason, we have also memory-holed Donald Trump’s own long and tangled affair with antisemitism. Recall that Trump himself dined with Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and declared afterward: "I really like this guy. He gets me."2
As I noted at the time, it takes only about 10 seconds on Google to find out that Nick Fuentes is not your garden variety MAGA bigot. As his Wikipedia page helpfully notes, he is an unabashed white supremacist Groyper who “denies the Holocaust” and “self-identifies as a member of the incel movement, as a supporter of authoritarian government, and as a Catholic integralist and Christian nationalist.”
But this was not simply a one-off. Trump had turned a blind eye to antisemites for years. And I wrote about it at length back in 2017 in “How the Right Lost It’s Mind”; and again in 2018 for The Weekly Standard,( “Donald Trump’s Anti-Semitism Problem—And Ours”); and in 2022 for Politico Magazine: “The Warped Electoral Logic Behind Trump’s Antisemitism.”)
In the Politico piece I offered a short history:
Shortly before the 2016 election, Trump laid out his theory of a vast globalist conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton meeting secretly with “international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”
Time magazine called this his “Grand Unified Campaign Conspiracy Theory” that drew upon “conspiracy theories that have been nurtured for years by far-right outlets” like Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
The ADL also expressed alarm when Trump retweeted an image of a “corrupt” Clinton and a Star of David. “We’ve been troubled by the anti-Semites and racists during this political season,” the ADL said in a statement, “and we’ve seen a number of so-called Trump supporters peddling some of the worst stereotypes all through this year.”
The Jewish group was especially concerned that Trump “hasn’t spoken out forcefully against these people. It is outrageous to think that the candidate is sourcing material from some of the worst elements in our society.”
But the pattern had been set.
During the 2016 campaign, Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, posted an article headlined: “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian K--e Julia Ioffe in GQ,” featuring a picture of Ioffe wearing a Nazi-era yellow star with the word “Jude” and a call to action from Anglin: “Please go ahead and send her a tweet and let her know what you think of her dirty k--e trickery. Make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests, or send her the picture with the Jude star from the top of this article.”
When Trump was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the antisemitic attacks and death threats, the future president refused to condemn them, saying “I don’t have a message to the fans. A woman wrote an article that was inaccurate.”
Trump’s refusal to denounce the outpouring of hate was greeted with delight by Anglin, who immediately posted: “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” (Last week, Musk restored Anglin’s account on Twitter.)
After decades of fending off cranks, crackpots, and antisemites, the alt-right had brought them back into the political bloodstream with the acquiescence of the GOP nominee.
And then came Charlottesville.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene and “Jewish space lasers.”
And QAnon.
Meanwhile, Fox News began mainstreaming the “Great Replacement Theory,” and whitewashing the antisemitism of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West by editing out his anti-Jewish comments.
In October, when Trump complained about ungrateful Jews, there was little or no pushback from Republicans.
After Ye tweeted that he was “going death con3 on JEWISH people,” the former president invited him to dinner. He came with a notorious neo-Nazi.
And, once again, Trump offered no apology.
Friday dogs
Auggie and Moses, eight years ago,
The list is constantly updated, and includes:
Jan. 26, 2025: In a speech at a convention for Germany’s far-right AfD party, Musk tells the crowd of 4,500 people, “There is too much focus on past guilt” in the country “and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” He added that he believed the party could “preserve” and “protect” German culture, which he implied was facing a threat. “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said.
Jan. 23, 2025: Embroiled in controversy around a hand gesture he made that resembled a Nazi salute, Musk shared to X a post containing a series of Holocaust puns. “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” Musk wrote. “Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that comin.”
Sep. 3, 2024: Musk posts a video clip of a podcaster named Darryl Cooper telling Tucker Carlson that millions of people died during the Holocaust not because Nazi Germany had any desire to exterminate Jews and other ethnic minorities, but rather because Adolf Hitler went into World War II without a plan for how to house and feed prisoners. Musk commented, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” in resharing the post to his 196 million X followers. He later deleted the post.
May 2, 2024: Musk reinstated the X account of Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier and antisemite who has said “perfidious Jews” should be executed. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted,” Musk wrote, “than grow simmering in the darkness.”
As you remember, Trump also dined that night with Kanye West, who was clearly going through a mental meltdown of some sort. And was posting this kind of thing:
The anti-Semitic, and bigotry in general, genie has been out of the bottle w Trump since 2015, if not before. He famously said "[racists] vote too" in a not for public consumption way back in his 1st campaign. Studies after his 1st election pointed at racial resentment as the driver for why Trump won. Well, good luck getting that uncorked genie back in the bottle when (if?) Trump no longer leads the GOP.
As for Musk, his tweets & statements speak for themselves. You can take the boy out of South Africa, but you can't take South Africa out of the boy.
What a fine mess of a political party the GOP is these days on just this issue alone.
Jews, trans people, Muslims without planes, Latinos … they deserve all our opprobrium; but whites from South Africa … they need our protection! (From Jews, trans people, Muslims without planes and Latinos).