Jonathan P. Baird

During election campaigns, many wild and hyperbolic things get said. One comment that pushed my buttons was Donald Trump’s statement that Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the election. The logic is twisted but Trump’s assertion unmistakably evokes Jewish history.

Trump has said Jews supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris “should have their head examined”. He said 40% of American Jews support him (actually the number is closer to 30%). He went on:

“That means you got 60% voting for somebody that hates Israel. It’s only because of the Democrat hold or curse on you. You can’t let that happen – 40% is not acceptable because we have an election to win.”

Previously Trump has said that Jewish voters who support Democrats “should be ashamed of themselves” over their lack of loyalty to him and he has said such voters “hate their religion”. He says he is Israel’s “best friend” and he points to relocating the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s control of the Golan Heights and brokering the Abraham Accords.

All these statements demand a response. Jews make up 2.4% of the American population. Of that 2.4%, 1.8% are voting age adults. Assuming 75% of those eligible vote, you are down to 1.3% of voters. About one-quarter of Jewish voters live in New York, a state Trump has no chance to win and another 20% live in California, another state where Trump is not contending.

Pennsylvania does have 300,000 Jewish voters (there are 8.8 million registered voters in the state). It is a state where Jews have a presence but how do you conclude that Jews bear much of the responsibility if Trump loses? The facts don’t support that. Jewish voting numbers are not that consequential in the other battleground states that will decide the Electoral College vote. You can just as easily and more persuasively argue the electoral importance of African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims or young people.

Trump is trying to scare Jewish voters into voting for him saying bad things will happen if he loses, including the total annihilation of Israel. Of course, this is consistent with his doom-and-gloom message about the state of everything if he loses. No doubt he has his own criminal cases in mind and the possibility of future jail time.

Blaming the Jews for his possible electoral loss is fundamentally about scapegoating. He is demonizing Jews who vote for Democrats. His words are putting American Jews into the crosshairs of his many conspiracy-minded supporters. MAGA extremists have shown impressive capability in harassment. Trump’s words can sic a mob.

Many on the far right fear a Great Replacement where minorities, allegedly manipulated by Jews, replace the white majority. From Tucker Carlson to Nick Fuentes, that is a mantra.That was the thinking of the shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. There is a pattern of mass shooters posting manifestos online citing Great Replacement as justification.

Trump’s blaming words evoke Germany’s “stab in the back” history. German nationalists and Nazis argued Germany lost World War 1 because they had been stabbed in the back by an international Jewish conspiracy. This slander contributed to the growing antisemitism in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Trump singling out Jews is dangerous since antisemitism has regained more of a foothold in America. Antisemitism can be increasingly found on the American right.

In discussing the reasons why Trump believes Jews should vote for him, Israel is central. He makes no appeal based on American political issues. He treats American Jews like they are Israelis and appeals to them based on his slavish support for Netanyahu’s government. In 2019 at a Republican Jewish Coalition meting, he called Netanyahu “your Prime Minister”.

Trump is calling out a second antisemitic trope that has plagued Jews over time.That is dual loyalty, the notion that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. That trope has an ancient history and it has been employed against Jews in contexts like Dreyfuss’s France and in the former Soviet Union. The message is that Jews are foreign guests in their home country, not true citizens. That is the kind of thinking that inspires Jew hatred from people who fear the other.

The irony is that Netanyahu’s extremist and bellicose government is doing more to promote antisemitism through its actions than anything else. Israel has become a rogue state violating international law with impunity. Trump’s support for Netanyahu is actually endangering Jews in Israel and around the world. Netanyahu and his allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have fanned the flames of hatred and they have created a new generation of people who will hate Israel.

Only diplomacy, a ceasefire and return of the hostages can lead to a lessening of the chances of a regional war which is in the common interest of humanity. A ceasefire, not more war, will help reduce antisemitism.

Last week Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a resolution to force a vote in Congress to block billions of dollars in offensive American weapons sales to Israel. That may be the only leverage the United States has over Netanyahu. Blindly supporting Netanyahu and his racist government doesn’t fight antisemitism. It does the opposite.

We are in a new period where old thinking about how to fight antisemitism doesn’t apply. American Jews largely oppose MAGA because we recognize that movement is a fascist threat. It is a movement that supports self-professed Nazis like Mark Robinson. Maintaining our democracy offers the best protection against antisemitism.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine, I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New Orleans and went to Selma, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston. The theme of the trip was “From Slavery to Civil Rights”. We had a chance to meet with some older civil rights heroes and some younger activists fighting environmental racism.

New Orleans has a reputation for Mardi Gras, jazz, gumbo and the Saints. Lost is the city’s history and its role in the slave trade. The trade of human beings from Africa to Louisiana began in 1718 with the first slave ships arriving in 1719. The trade continued through French, Spanish and American rule.

After Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, for the next 57 years New Orleans was a center of the slave trade in the United States. The city had more than fifty documented slave trade sites. Enslaved people were sold from slave pens, public squares, government buildings, church properties, city taverns, private residences, auction blocks and ballrooms of luxury hotels.

During the first half of the 19th century, the slave traders trafficked two million men, women and children inside the United States. Most of the enslaved were brought from the Upper South to the Lower South via overland and water routes. Before the trek, the slave traders ruthlessly separated families.

After the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction, segregation ruled in America. Lynchings, the Klan, and voter suppression particularly reinforced white supremacy in the South. From 1896 to 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court blessed racial segregation in the case of Plessy v Ferguson which dictated separate but supposedly equal.

Opponents of racism and segregation faced an almost frozen social order but that did not stop the NAACP and other activists from opposing the status quo. In 1952, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on behalf of some Black parents challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in New Orleans schools.

On our trip, our group met with Leona Tate who had been one of the children who integrated the New Orleans schools in 1960. She and the other two, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, were first graders then. Six years after the Brown v Board of Education case they entered McDonogh 19 Public School pursuant to a court order issued by Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright. Another little girl, Ruby Bridges, was also integrating a different New Orleans public school at the same time.

The Louisiana power structure left no stone unturned in their efforts to stop integration and to maintain white supremacy. Although Brown ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed”, delaying forever was the game plan.

Because school officials did not want integration, they had designed an approval process that most children couldn’t pass. It included arbitrary and whitewashed standards of intelligence and behavior. The parents of 137 black first graders had applied to have their children transferred to all-white schools. Only five were selected. Tate, Prevost and Etienne, later dubbed the McDonogh 3, were selected. They had excelled.

Leona Tate described the absolutely toxic environment they faced. On November 14, 1960, the three girls were escorted to the school by federal marshals.because of racist mobs that protested outside the school. The federal marshals stayed for the whole school year. For 18 months white parents and younger people came to protest. Within a few days after the three girls entered school, all the white students left McDonogh 19.

The girls didn’t see much of the protest outside the school because classroom windows were covered with brown paper. They had to play inside during recess. They ate lunch under the protection of a stairwell. They were the first black children to enter previously all-white schools since 1877.

The families of the girls who were selected experienced harassment. They received death threats on the phone. People drove a funeral hearse up and down their street. Gail Etienne’s father received a package containing a dead bird. The local police sat in squad cars at night outside the girls’ homes.

For the entire first grade year, the three girls were the only students at McDonogh 19. In January 1961, a white family tried to send two sons to McDonogh but they ended up attending for only a few days. The family was harassed so badly they had to leave the city.

In second grade, the three girls remained the only students at McDonogh. After Christmas that year, things started changing. Twenty-five new students arrived, including two white students. Tensions lessened a bit. The U.S. Marshals left and the windows at school were uncovered.

In third grade, the school district sent the three girls to a different school, Thomas J. Semmes Elementary. Other black students were also sent to Semmes. There were no U.S. Marshals there and white students did not leave the school. Many of the white students remained hostile to the girls.

Tate now calls her experience at Semmes “a house of horror”. The black children were punched, shoved, kicked, tripped and spat on. The school authorities, even knowing what was going on, looked the other way and did nothing to protect the children but the three girls made it through.

Notably, two years after the integration of New Orleans schools, Tulane University also de-segregated. It was the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the area and it had been segregated for 129 years. The integration of the public schools paved the way for the integration of universities as well as buses, parks, sporting events and voting rolls.

Judge Wright made many enemies when he authored his desegregation opinion. He was ostracized and isolated from New Orleans society life. He was considered the most hated man in Louisiana and he was referred to as “Judas” Wright and Judge J. Scalawag Wright. He also required full-time protection by U.S. Marshals and New Orleans police. Judge Wright’s order in the New Orleans case was the first post-Brown desegregation order issued by a judge in the Deep South.

Looking back, it is no exaggeration to say Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne opened the door to school equality in the United States. Their heroism has been insufficiently appreciated and acknowledged. After generations of injustice, they stepped up at a pivotal moment.

Tate still lives in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. She acquired what had become the abandoned McDonogh 19 building, had it registered as a National Historic Landmark and she re-opened the school as the Tate Etienne Prevost (TEP) Interpretive Center. The Center’s mission is “to teach, exhibit and engage visitors in New Orleans civil rights history”. She continues to work in efforts to reconstruct and improve the community.

Most political coverage of the presidential election has treated the contest as a horse race between two conventional candidates. I would suggest that framing doesn’t do justice to the Harris-Trump match-up. We are not talking about two candidates who support democracy.

Donald Trump has shown himself to be a dire threat to democracy. He showed that again in his debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris when he once again denied that he lost the 2020 election. Election denialism in the form of the Big Lie is incompatible with democracy. Democracy requires that losers accept results of the popular will which Trump has not done. Any election he loses is falsely and automatically attacked as “rigged”.

Election denialism is hardly the only oddity of the Trump candidacy. Observers have been trying to define how Trump’s candidacy is different from Republicans of the past.The best analysis I have seen comes from Federico Finchelstein in his book, The Wannabe Fascists. Finchelstein says Trump represents a new breed of politician who aspires to destroy democratic institutions for short-term personal gain.

He calls such politicians “wannabe fascists”. He says they lack the ideological fervor and extremism of a Hitler or Mussolini. They are weaker and more incompetent than the classical fascists although Finchelstein sees them as potentially highly dangerous since they are angling to be dictators.

Along with Trump in this category, he places such other leaders as Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Narendra Modi of India, and Viktor Orban of Hungary. Finchelstein says these leaders, when in power, have not entirely destroyed the legal system in their countries nor have they unleashed violence at the level of classical German or Italian fascism but they welcome violence. Think of Trump at the Capitol on January 6 saying “we fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more”.

In making his case, Finchelstein offers some important distinctions about the fascist project. He writes:

“The primary aim of fascism was to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above. Fascists proposed a totalitarian state in which plurality and civil society would be silenced and there would be few distinctions between the public and the private, or between the state and its citizens. Fascist regimes shut down the independent press and destroyed the rule of law.”

Trump talks up violence and revenge against his opponents. He has promised to use military tribunals against President Obama and House committee members who investigated January 6. He has suggested General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves execution for alleged treason. Trump has repeatedly tweeted about locking up President Biden and Hillary Clinton, among others. He says if he wins the election, his planned mass deportations will be “bloody”.

Violence and the embrace of violence are central to the fascist project. Being out of power, Trump currently lacks the resources to inflict mass violence but his attitude towards those convicted of January 6-related crimes is illuminating. He cozies up to Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others who might be his future storm troopers. He explicitly talks about pardoning the convicted January 6 defendants.

If he regains state power, he has been open about using the Insurrection Act against protesters and those opposing him. Whether he would resort to concentration camps and to the mass killing stage of fascism is an open question. There is a historical pattern where the early acts of fascists are jailing and killing those perceived to be their enemy, including leftists, social democrats and Jews. Trump talks about Marxists as “vermin”.

This talk is a first step in the dehumanization process to justify repression. If you see your opponents as sub-human monsters, you grease the path to concentration camps and executions.

Classical fascism has thrived on relentless propaganda and lies. Trump’s cult of personality follows that tradition. In his first term, the Washington Post fact checker team catalogued over 30,000 false or misleading statements Trump made. And that pattern has continued. I think Trump spreading outrageous racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets represents a new low.

Trump self-describes as a person of “extraordinary genius” although it is doubtful he has ever read a book. The writer Michael Wolff says he doesn’t even skim. His past aides have said he barely reads bullet points. Wolff quotes economic advisor Gary Cohn who says “It’s worse than you can imagine…Trump won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing”. Finchelstein writes;

“To defend democracy, it is necessary to put a stop to the attacks on history that attempt to redefine our present with fantasies about the past. Many actors on the extreme right want to turn history into a myth and then use it as a model to distort the present.”

Trump’s motto of Make America Great Again is about myth creation. When was this golden age Trump is harkening back to? He is talking about a time that never existed. How does Trump square Make America Great Again with the American history of genocide against Native Americans and slavery against African Americans? He doesn’t.

Fascism defines itself against enemies. Instead of accepting differences of opinion, Trumpism aligns against immigrants, LGBTQ people and leftists. Fascists also have a problem with women who refuse to subordinate. They see the role of women as passive wife and mother, limited to the private sphere. Trump’s anti-abortion views remove agency from women. As an adjudicated sexual abuser and as an individual accused of sexual impropriety by over 20 women, his actions have reflected fascism’s misogyny.

Classical fascism used democracy to gain power. After they gained power, they ruthlessly repressed all opposition. They used the mechanisms of democracy to strangle it. They had no use for any democratic institutions after they seized power. Trump says he plans to be a dictator on “day one”. What dictator has ever relinquished power on day two or after? It doesn’t happen.

The mainstream media has performed a profound disservice by its efforts to normalize this race. Seeing the fascism performs the useful service of raising the stakes. Nothing about this election is normal.

When it is election season, political parties typically pose to be seen as a friend to the working class. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the Republican Party. No matter how anti-labor the party actually is, they will pretend to be on the side of the worker.

J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential candidate, is a perfect incarnation of the Republicans’ seeming embrace of workers. Born into the working class, he expresses a degree of empathy for the hardships people experience. Vance claims to represent heartland values rather than those of coastal elites. He will talk a good game about how the ruling class has betrayed America’s workers.

But Vance has come a very long way from the Appalachia of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir steeped in blaming poor people for their poverty. A Yale Law graduate, Vance ditched the working class for the big bucks available to those willing to do the bidding of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, his patron. Thiel made Vance a viable U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio by dropping $10 million into his campaign. Without that $10 million, Vance would have been an also-ran, not a U.S. Senator.

Whatever his class origins, Vance now represents the political interests of the tech sector which hatched him. Money like that always has strings attached. That is why the billionaires around Trump lobbied so hard to make him the vice-presidential choice. He is their man.

At the same time, Vance can point to a couple populist positions he has taken. He teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on legislation that would crack down on big banks and he joined with Sen. Sherrod Brown to introduce a Rail Safety Act after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. He has voiced support for Lina Khan, the embattled FTC Chair who has been aggressively anti-trust but all these positions are not reflective of more than lip service. Vance has opposed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act which would expand protections for workers seeking to unionize.

Scratching beneath the surface, the Republicans’ actual attitude toward labor, especially organized labor, remains hostile. As noted with Vance, Republicans do not look favorably on union organizing. Ever since President Reagan busted PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, in 1981, Republicans have been uniformly opposed to union organizing and have worked to make union successes a rare event. It is no accident that since the 1980’s, the number of American workers in unions has dramatically declined.

There was no better indication that this has not changed than Donald Trump’s livestream discussion with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in August. Trump lavished praise on Musk for firing striking workers. Trump’s admiration for Musk’s anti-worker stance could not have been more palpable. They were both laughing it up about how great it was to fire strikers.

After the interview, the UAW filed federal labor charges at the NLRB against Trump and Musk for threatening and intimidating workers. Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

While Trump has been desperately trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because he worries that association will lose him votes, I think the Project remains a good source to look to as far as Republican plans for a second Trump administration. They have an extensive section on labor. It includes these points:

• Banning unions for public service workers
• Firing thousands of civil service workers and replacing them with pro-Trump anti-union loyalists
• Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract
• Letting companies stop paying overtime and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws
• Eliminating child labor protections
• Firing “on day one” Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s strongly pro-union general counsel
• Reversing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the workplace
• Weakening OSHA enforcement against small businesses

I think the section in Project 2025 about expanding child labor is telling. The Project recommends that the Department of Labor should amend its regulations to let teenagers “work in more dangerous occupations”. Under federal law, age 18 is the floor. If you are 16 or 17, you are currently not allowed to work in dangerous jobs.

Project 2025 is responding to the employer community which is struggling to find enough workers. The Project wants child labor but remains oblivious to the obvious risk. There has been a national surge in child labor. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor pursued 955 cases and found 5,792 minors employed in violation of labor law. 196 of the violations involved hazardous occupations.

Relaxing child labor laws is a form of child abuse. We need a new Charles Dickens to write about it. There is a noticeable silence about this child abuse to real children from a party dedicated to protecting the unborn. In 2023, a 16 year old was killed on the job at a slaughterhouse in Mississippi, another 16 year old was killed working at a sawmill in Wisconsin and a third 16 year old died in Missouri working at a landfill when he was pinned between a tractor trailer rig and its trailer.

The Republican Party has not changed. They have never tried to use the government to help working people and it is the height of naivete to expect that would change now. Republican legislators, judges and presidents work to help corporate America evade or overturn any law that helps the working class. In 2024 we can expect more of the same.

(In the interests of full disclosure I would note that I am a union member and belong to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) which is an AFL-CIO union)

For all the words written about Donald Trump, not much effort has been made to place him in historical context. There is a demagoguery tradition in America that Trump fits in. The tradition goes far beyond boldness in lying. It is about playing to popular prejudices and fears, scapegoating out-groups and making empty promises.

Some names come to mind: Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Theodore Bilbo, Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin. They reflect an ultra-right tradition drenched in white supremacy and support for authoritarianism. Antisemitism also sometimes figures in. Trump is an inheritor of a long line.

America has always had its quota of demagogues. Trump is hardly the first politician to threaten democracy but in the last 75 years there is only one other person who rivals Trump as a national level demagogue. That person is Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wi).

I had not thought that much about the parallels between Trump and McCarthy until I listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra. In her second season, she does a deep dive into McCarthyism and shows aspects of McCarthy that have been obscured.

McCarthy has mostly been known for falsely ranting about communist infiltration of the federal government. He famously claimed to have a list of 205 communists who worked in the U.S. State Department but he never produced a single name. He paraded hundreds of innocent people before a Senate subcommittee, trampling their constitutional rights and often ruining their livelihoods.

Maddow shows McCarthy’s connection to a group of Republican senators and representatives who believed America had been on the wrong side in World War 2. The group transitioned from being supporters of the America First movement to being Nazi supporters. They participated in a conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and distribute it to the American people. They also actually opposed the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

McCarthy called the Nuremberg trials a “sorry spectacle”. As a new senator, McCarthy took up the cause of the Nazi defendants in the Malmedy massacre case. Little-remembered now, in December 1944, American soldiers were ambushed by Waffen-SS troops in Malmedy, Belgium. After being captured and taken as POWs, a group of 120 Americans were machine-gunned and slaughtered. A few POWs played dead and escaped to tell the story. After the war, the Nazis were put on trial, convicted and sentenced.

In an effort to reverse the convictions, the Nazi defendants and their lawyers manufactured a false story that they had been tortured and horribly mistreated by Jewish investigators and interrogators employed by the American military. McCarthy took up the cause of the Malmedy defendants. He and North Dakota Senator William Langer forced a Senate investigation of the baseless allegation of Jewish torture of the Nazis.

There were a number of investigations of Malmedy and multiple sentences of the defendants were reduced even though their argument was a farce. Originally the war crime tribunal at Dachau sentenced 43 Nazis to death for their role in Malmedy but none of the death sentences were ever carried out.

McCarthy used the investigation as a launch pad toward national name recognition. His behavior mirrored the same hysterical bullying for which he would later become famous. He echoed Nazi propaganda, arguing Jewish mistreatment of the Malmedy defendants was worse than what the Nazis did.

Both McCarthy and Trump have shared an obsession with being a center of attention.They were both schooled by disbarred lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn who advised them about how to dominate the news cycle. Cohn always advised punching back hard. He was a merciless bomb thrower. McCarthy hired Cohn as his chief counsel for his senate subcommittee. Trump retained Cohn when the government sued him and his father for race discrimination in housing rentals.

While both McCarthy and Trump cozied up to the far right neither was ever a true believer. Neither ever had explicit fascist principles. Both allied with the far right but it is impossible to see them as ideologues. They were both about advancing themselves. Trump’s recent maneuvering on abortion is a perfect example. He would sell out any side if he thought it would politically help him.

Both McCarthy and Trump have been masters of the Big Lie. With McCarthy it was seeing communists under every bed. With Trump it has been his election fraud nonsense. Both have been opportunists. Neither actually believed their narrative as much as they pretended to. They spun conspiracies and ceaselessly attacked their critics, always acting aggrieved.

To its everlasting discredit, the Republican Party enabled both of them, never morally critiquing them, opposing them or even trying to rein them in.

I think Trump learned from the Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn playbook. And he has proven to be far more dangerous as a demagogue as Trump again stands at the threshold of power. No one knows how extreme Trump would be in a second term and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

In considering why America has not made more progress in moving toward multiracial democracy, I would cite our tradition of demagogues like Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. They advance selfishness, hate and a retrograde vision of an America that has never existed. Both McCarthy and Trump are devoid of any moral compass. They specialize in manipulating fear and promoting ruthless self-aggrandizement.

McCarthy died of alcoholism at 48, being in the limelight for a short period of five years. Trump is now 78. His tenure in the limelight has been longer lasting. The voters must now determine whether they have had enough of the Trump show. The demagoguery of both these men is a lasting stain on our nation’s history.