In the pages of the Forward, Jay Michaelson identifies Donald Trump as “the candidate for white supremacists”—and warns Jews off.
The white supremacist ID has much to recommend it. Michaelson correctly points out the high poll correlations between visceral hatred of Barack Obama and anti-Obama conspiracy theories, as well as discomfort with nowhite “others,” with support for Trump, especially but not only among Republicans. Even so, equating Trump just with “white racism” is too narrow an interpretation.
It is better to unpack his appeal in terms of five negative gospels.
1. Anti-World: First, Trump is very much at war with globalization and the world, with the exception that proves the rule of like-minded Putin’s isolated Russia, at war or nearly at war with its neighbors. He’s Isolationist, believing in “America First,” Last, and Always. He of course wants to build a Wall with Mexico, and go to (trade) war with China. He’s sanguine about the possibility of a war involving nuclear-armed Japan and South Korea, whose atomic aspirations he would bless, as well as Saudi nukes in the Mideast. He loves Israel except when he’s neutral towards it and wants it to carry all the economic weight for being our only reliable Mideast ally. He wants to pound ISIS-controlled parts of the Mideast into oblivion, but then withdraw except to keep their oil wells. He wants the UK to withdraw from the EU as a first installment on the U.S. scrapping the NATO Alliance. He even disparaged Tex Cruz for the sin of allegedly being “a Canadian.”
2. Anti-Women: One could argue whether Trump is better described as “anti-feminist” than “anti-women” or misogynist, but to a considerable degree, it’s a distinction without a difference. While the Drudge Report is recycling scandals about Bill Clinton’s alleged youthful and middle age sexcapades, Trump (the same age as me and Clinton) was a major contender if not the champ with views hailing back to when comedian Mort Sahl (I believe) said “women’s place is in the oven.” He seems really to relish having targeted apparently happily married women with no consideration of the unhappiness that caused their husbands or his own wives. He targets wives like Heidi Cruz to get back at their husbands, while calling Hillary an “enabler” to convict her of Bill’s sins. He’s called women he considers ugly as losers, whores, and worse. He’s called Rosie O’Donnell “a fat pig,” mocked Carly Fiorina’s looks, suggested Megan Kelley oozes menstrual fluid, and said a New York Times columnist has “the face of a dog.” Never so far as I know has he championed women’s right to succeed or exceed, despite token appointments to visible positions in his business empire. Overall, he pays women a third less than men.
3. Anti-Minority: we know the major list here. He’s demeaned or demonized Mexicans (mostly recently an American-born judge of Mexican heritage), Muslims, and Chinese for starters. That’s two thirds of the globe’s population. To go with the 50 percent-plus who are female. Less well known are his aspersions against Dr. Ben Carson’s Seventh Day Adventism and Mitt Romney’s Mormonism as well as his picking a fight with Pope Francis.
4. Anti-Semitism: I would not call Trump a card-carrying anti-Semite. I would call him a fellow traveler or borderline case for his lassitude in repudiating David Duke and failure to denounce by name and tendencies the legion of Anti-Semitic trolls who post pictures and jokes about gas ovens and age-old anti-Semitic caricatures—who cheer on line for him. He lies that his family, originally Dumpf, hailed from Sweden father than Germany, and hides that his father was arrested on the fringes of a murderous KKK riot in New York in the 1920s. His first wife claimed he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches by their bedside. As is well known, he has a daughter who converted to Judaism to marry an Orthodox Jew and bear him Jewish children. Yet even after his daughter was married, he tweeted in 2013 this: “I promise you that I'm much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz—I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow. Who, by the way, is totally overrated.”
5. Anti-Science: Personally, I’m am fazed by Trump’s views on “the climate change hoax” and inexhaustible fossil fuels, but his reveling in other forms of irrationality scares me even more. This extends to crackpot notions about the spread of Ebola and causes of autism. In addition, I mean his penchant for conspiracy theories about the World Trade Center attacks, President George W. Bush’s complicity in them, “Kenyan” Barack Obama’s birth place, Ted Cruz’s father’s buddyship with Lee Harvey Oswald, etc., etc.
Donald Trump is a blood-and-soil nationalist in the worst German tradition who believes that whites are uber alles and his version of Protestantism (if he indeed adheres to any religion) is superior to all others. Yet when it comes to bigotries, he is truly a man for all seasons. I list only five.
