Thank god Trump didn’t talk about antisemitism in his speech to Congress

Contributing Columnist
Emily Tamkin
March 5, 2025

I felt relief when President Donald Trump wrapped up his Tuesday night address to a joint session of Congress — not because the long speech was finally over, but because Trump had not talked about antisemitism or Jews.

The president has stacked his administration with people who have spread and enabled antisemitism. He has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories, repeatedly insulted Jews who didn’t vote for him, and pardoned members of the neofascist Proud Boys group. Given that record, I did not want to hear him talk about what he is doing to fight antisemitism — especially when those efforts, to date, have been focused almost exclusively on threatening pro-Palestinian protesters. While some protesters have crossed over into antisemitism, I think that cracking down on freedom of assembly and institutions of higher learning, and targeting people on visas, are moves that weaken the democratic protections that have let Jews thrive here.

So, yes, it was a relief to not have to hear Trump tell Congress and the country that he was cracking down, in those ways, for the good of Jews. In fact, aside from a brief mention of Israel — Trump assured us that a lot of things are happening in the Middle East, which is technically true — Trump didn’t mention Jews much at all.

But in an important way, my relief was fake. Because while Trump didn’t talk explicitly about antisemitism or Jews, Jewish safety and security is intimately bound up in so much of what he did talk about. And the signs are dire.

Trump boasted about the end of wokeness and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. I know that there are some American Jews who think that DEI has allowed antisemitism to fester, both by excluding Jewishness from many definitions of diversity and by (the thinking goes) creating a hierarchy of oppressions in which Jews, perceived as white and wealthy, don’t count.

But in reality, the attack on DEI and “wokeness” has also meant an attack on Jewish history.

A few examples: Since Trump came into office, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm reportedly stopped observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day; a database by Sen. Ted Cruz flagged a grant for the study of Hebrew as “woke DEI” (Hebrew, like many other languages, is gendered); and Google removed Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American History Month from Google Calendar, amid rather unbelievable claims that the move was not a response to Trump.

Trump also, throughout his address, pushed falsehoods and half-truths on, well, everything: the economy, government research, border crossings, etcetera. We know by now, a decade after Trump launched his first campaign, that this is part of his political project: When everything is a lie, he believes, his opponents will get bogged down in trying to find out what’s true, making them less adept at trying to counter his destructive agenda.

But we also know, after the whole of Jewish history, that a society in which nothing is true, everything is nihilistic, and conspiracy theories abound tends to be fertile ground for breeding antisemitism. Recent studies have found that antisemitic attitudes can be reasonably predicted by, among other things, belief in global conspiracies, and the desire for a strong leader to overturn the social order. That a strong leader was promising societal upheavals while pushing conspiracies last night was thus not a promising sign.

But perhaps most concerningly, while Trump did not mention Jews, he did target, at length, other minorities, like migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and transgender students across America. And on reflection, any initial relief I felt in not finding Jews on that list evaporated.

That wasn’t just because we’ve seen, over and over again, that xenophobia and antisemitism are intertwined — illustrated by the ways, to take one prominent example, that the conspiracy Trump pushed during the campaign about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield echoed old antisemitic blood libel tropes. And it wasn’t because there are Jewish refugees who are and will be caught up in Trump’s draconian immigration policies, and Jewish trans kids being denied services they need.

It was because a United States in which we wait with baited breath to see which minorities will end up under the rhetorical wheel isn’t really safe for any minority.

A society in which an entire minority group is pushed out of, say, the military is a society in which pluralism, liberalism, democracy and minority rights — all of the things that I believe make me safe as a Jew in America — threaten to bend until they break.

I am glad that Trump did not get up before members of Congress and weaponize antisemitism. I’m glad that he didn’t explicitly push antisemitic conspiracy theories. But I can’t feel any lasting comfort.

Trump spoke of a dawning golden age of the United States — perhaps slightly ironic, on a day when the stock market dropped precipitously amid his new tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada. It might be tempting to believe that the prosperity and wellbeing he envisions will extend to Jews, too. But on a more careful listen, I’m afraid he’s selling us fool’s gold.

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