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The Atlantic: Trump's Jewish Cover Story
The Atlantic - Trump’s Jewish Cover Story (Gift link)
The administration claims to be protecting Jews while advancing an agenda that most Jews oppose.
By Yair Rosenberg
April 4, 2025, 7 AM ET
The Trump administration wants you to know that it’s just looking out for Jews. In recent weeks, the White House has cited anti-Semitism as the motivation for many of its controversial moves, whether deporting foreign students who allegedly engaged in pro-Hamas activism or threatening to pull millions of government dollars from Ivy League schools. “SHALOM COLUMBIA,” quipped the White House’s X account, after it canceled federal funding to the university over its “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”
But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.
Take the detentions and deportations. A handful of high-profile cases purportedly pertain to the targets’ anti-Semitic conduct. But most of them do not. In just the past month, the administration’s immigration agents have reportedly held a former Canadian actor for 12 days across three prisons; jailed a Harvard Medical School researcher for transporting undeclared scientific samples for her boss, and threatened to send her back to Russia, which she had fled; revoked the visa of the two-time president of Costa Rica, apparently over his criticism of Trump; and deported hundreds of Venezuelans—including a makeup artist seeking asylum and a Maryland father with no criminal record—to a notorious prison in El Salvador, some of them possibly on the basis of misunderstood tattoos.
These stories underscore that the administration’s deportation spree is clearly not about defending Jews, but rather part of a broader anti-foreigner agenda whose goal is to make America into a country for a narrowly defined set of citizens. “America is not just an idea,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” U.S. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller put it more bluntly at an October rally: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
This nationalist agenda explains why one of the first things Trump did after assuming office was sign executive orders to end birthright citizenship and suspend refugee resettlement, after which he began deporting foreign-born residents on every possible pretext. Fighting anti-Semitism is not the rationale for this overhaul of the American experiment, so much as it is a convenient crowbar to pry open the door for more ambitious aims. The crackdown on foreign students offers a case in point: Last week, Axios reported that “the Trump administration is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas.’”
/snip
The administration claims to be protecting Jews while advancing an agenda that most Jews oppose.
By Yair Rosenberg
April 4, 2025, 7 AM ET
The Trump administration wants you to know that it’s just looking out for Jews. In recent weeks, the White House has cited anti-Semitism as the motivation for many of its controversial moves, whether deporting foreign students who allegedly engaged in pro-Hamas activism or threatening to pull millions of government dollars from Ivy League schools. “SHALOM COLUMBIA,” quipped the White House’s X account, after it canceled federal funding to the university over its “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”
But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.
Take the detentions and deportations. A handful of high-profile cases purportedly pertain to the targets’ anti-Semitic conduct. But most of them do not. In just the past month, the administration’s immigration agents have reportedly held a former Canadian actor for 12 days across three prisons; jailed a Harvard Medical School researcher for transporting undeclared scientific samples for her boss, and threatened to send her back to Russia, which she had fled; revoked the visa of the two-time president of Costa Rica, apparently over his criticism of Trump; and deported hundreds of Venezuelans—including a makeup artist seeking asylum and a Maryland father with no criminal record—to a notorious prison in El Salvador, some of them possibly on the basis of misunderstood tattoos.
These stories underscore that the administration’s deportation spree is clearly not about defending Jews, but rather part of a broader anti-foreigner agenda whose goal is to make America into a country for a narrowly defined set of citizens. “America is not just an idea,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” U.S. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller put it more bluntly at an October rally: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
This nationalist agenda explains why one of the first things Trump did after assuming office was sign executive orders to end birthright citizenship and suspend refugee resettlement, after which he began deporting foreign-born residents on every possible pretext. Fighting anti-Semitism is not the rationale for this overhaul of the American experiment, so much as it is a convenient crowbar to pry open the door for more ambitious aims. The crackdown on foreign students offers a case in point: Last week, Axios reported that “the Trump administration is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas.’”
/snip
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