Including the Judenräte.
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In order to believe Donald Trump is anti-semitic you have to believe he wants to harm his own granddaughter. That’s a pretty difficult case to make; I think most people are going to ignore the political and social opinions of anyone who claims the President is an anti-semite. It tends to discredit the claimant.
But it does seem like Trump is pro-Jewish in a creepy, racist, disturbing way. His statements give the impression that he believes in a stereotype of grasping, greedy, conniving Jews, but he considers these to be positive qualities, not negative. It feels creepy to me, too, Mr. Wolff!
Trump wants to fuck his own daughter. I have no idea what he believes about his family. But in the photo I posted above Trump was defending actual Nazis who were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Trump is an anti-semite.
ETA: To clarify what I mean by not knowing what Trump believes about his family, Trump’s relationships with his children would make Freud’s head explode. I have no idea how he rationalizes the “jewishness” of Ivanka, Jared and their children. But it is doubtlessly some weird shit.
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That seems like an unreasonable interpretation of the term “anti-semite”. Lots of people hold negative views of groups and even actively do things to harm those groups while liking some individual members of that group just fine.
Also, honestly, I don’t think we should assume Trump cares about his children or grandchildren, at least not in the way we normally mean when we say that people care about their children and grandchildren.
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A casual one, to be sure: regularly indulges in negative and positive stereotypes, makes exceptions for “the good ones” (e.g. family members), regularly Others them in creepy ways. And yes, he goes past that by defending more virulent anti-Semites and accepting their support.
He saves his outright bigotry for African-Americans, Latinxs, and women.
As with everything else about this pathological narcissist, he cares about them only insofar as they’re reflections of his own awesomeness.
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He will protect the Jewish people he sees as the good ones. It has happened before.
Everyone else is fucked though.
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Now that I’m mostly through the book I can say that doesn’t really do it justice. While this book doesn’t really tell us a whole lot we didn’t know about the events of the last year, what it DOES do is provide a context for many of the individual players’ actions and motives. The specific quotes in the book are damning but really only serve to support the central narrative (and it’s noteworthy that there have been relatively few specific allegations of Wolff actually fabricating those quotes).
The meat of the book boils down to this: due to Trump’s management style (or lack thereof) the West Wing lacks anything close to a traditional organizational hierarchy. As a result there were essentially three warring factions fighting to push their agendas through an incompetent, unstable and easily distracted President:
- Reince Priebus, the nominal Chief of Staff who was aligned with establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan
- Jared & Ivanka, who in many ways were essentially “Goldman Sachs Democrats”
- Steve Bannon, self-styled Nationalist revolutionary leader of the alt-right
In Wolff’s telling many events and decisions from the White House that seemed inexplicable or even incomprehensible suddenly make sense (that is, they are just as horrible but it’s possible to comprehend how they were allowed to occur given the players involved and their roles in the game).
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Thank you for the review!
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Called it.
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