Trust Trump on Israel? Hypocritical Biden-Harris supporters say ‘no’

Jonathan S. Tobin

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A sign congratulating U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on his victory in the election, in central Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

Kingsley Wilson should never have gotten a job in the Trump administration. The heretofore obscure conservative activist provided plenty of fodder for President Donald Trump’s critics this week when it was discovered that she has a history of antisemitic social-media posts.

A deep dive into the X account of the woman who serves as deputy press secretary in the U.S. Department of Defense provoked outrage this week from groups like the American Jewish Committee, in addition to liberal media outlets and many Democrats. Even some Republicans chimed in to note that the administration’s vetting process clearly failed in this case. In the past, she worked for the Trump campaign in 2020 and since then ran digital media and communications with the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, whose founder was Russel Vought, Trump’s influential director of the Office of Management and Budget. Apparently, no one in the Trump world had the good sense to realize that her record as an Internet troll was not only inappropriate but would also be held against the new administration.

Angry about Wilson’s appointment is entirely justified. Her post on X, in which she took the side of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1915 lynching of a Leo Frank—an Atlanta Jew who was framed for rape and murder—is evidence of staggering ignorance and anti-Jewish sentiment. That she said this in August 2024 and not sometime in the distant past when she was in high school or college makes it even worse. The fact that she wasn’t even forced to apologize is shocking. It also shows how many in the Trump administration, like the president himself, seem to believe that holding themselves accountable for even the most obvious mistakes is a sign of unforgivable weakness in the face of a hostile media.

Partisan spin

For the anti-Trump resistance, particularly those in the Jewish community, it was being treated as more than just a case of a bad apple amid a plethora of administration appointees at the highest levels who are both friends of the Jewish community and ardent supporters of Israel. It was, along with other exceptions to Trump’s pro-Israel rule—like Michael DiMino, the chief Middle East policy advisor at the Pentagon who has a history of hostility to Israel—treated by some as evidence that Trump can’t be trusted to stand against antisemitism or not to betray the Jewish state at some point in his second term.

The same people are jumping on the news that the administration is, in a first for the United States, negotiating directly with Hamas as part of the talks about a second phase for the ceasefire/hostage release deal. They say this is a reason to believe that Trump will stab Israel in the back.

The notion that Trump—by any reasonable measure the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state—hasn’t earned more trust than that rings hollow. But in a bifurcated political culture in which politics plays the role that religion once played in most people’s lives, expecting Democrats to give Republicans, especially those who work with Trump, the benefit of the doubt, is probably too much to ask.

That they would say it the same week when he was once again demonstrating the sort of moral clarity on Hamas in a social-media post in which he threatened them and demanded the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages is not just partisan spin. It’s also absurd.

The Tucker Carlson factor

Trump has himself been guilty of associating with people that the Jewish community rightly views as beyond the pale. But when judging a president, it’s policy that matters. On that score, the president has been exemplary when it comes to Israel. And he has been just as good when it comes to fighting antisemitism, especially on U.S. college campuses.

To note that is not to deny that there is a small faction of the GOP that is clearly hostile to Israel and, at best, soft on antisemitism, and at worst, guilty of it. The most prominent example is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who remains in the president’s inner circle. Carlson seems to have no more impact on Mideast policy or on combating antisemitism at home in Trump 2.0 than in his first administration. Still, even if he is no more than a friend and/or unofficial court jester at Mar-a-Lago, his continued presence alongside the president and his family at events remains troubling.

All administrations and political parties are inevitably coalitions that are bound to include some people who have strayed into the mainstream from the political fever swamps of the far right or far left. That even in an administration headed by pro-Israel figures like Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee (the former Arkansas governor who has been tapped as the next ambassador to Israel) people like DeMino or Wilson have gotten jobs is deeply regrettable. But it also testifies to the fact that when it comes to filling the approximately 4,000 political appointments in the federal government, there are always going to be a few people with friends or patrons in high places who don’t share the views of those in charge on some issues or cause embarrassment in other ways.

Trump’s team and Hegseth deserve the criticism they’ve gotten for Wilson. But to claim, as some on the left are doing, that her crazy views about Israel or Leo Frank are reason to label the entire administration as unworthy of support is a bridge too far.

Democrats turn on Israel

More importantly, it is a diversion from the reality of American politics when it comes to attitudes toward Israel and the way that antisemitism has been mainstreamed since Oct. 7, 2023, because of hostility to the Jewish state. The two parties’ opinions about the Jewish state are now so diametrically opposed that any remaining hope about support for it being a matter of bipartisanship is a boat that sailed a long time ago.

Nor is it a matter of “whataboutism” to note the contrast between Trump’s policies and appointments, and those of the Biden-Harris administration.

Though some on the left are making a meal out of Wilson, they seemed to have no trouble with the fact that Biden had plenty of anti-Israel and even antisemitic appointees. One prominent example was Robert Malley, a longtime apologist for the Palestinians and a bitter critic of Israel who was Biden’s special envoy for Iran until he was forced out due to losing his security clearance. Another was Maher Bitar, who was Biden’s senior director for Intelligence on the National Security Council before being promoted to deputy assistant to the president, and coordinator for intelligence and defense policy. Bitar had previously been a leader of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine and a veteran of UNRWA, the pro-Hamas agency that has helped perpetuate the conflict. Since January, he’s been working for Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is Jewish.

With people like Malley and Bitar advising them, it’s no surprise that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Biden spent the 15 months after Oct. 7 talking out of both sides of their mouths when it came to the war on Israel, even praising pro-Hamas students and saying that they should be heard.

Just as indicative of the difference between the last administration and the present one was the fact that even Biden’s equivocal attitude toward Israel’s fight for survival against Hamas was too much for many who served him throughout the government. Throughout its last year and a half, there was a civil war going on in the Biden-Harris administration as its half-hearted backing for Israel was protested by hundreds of staffers who signed petitions against it and others who resigned in protest. The same was true for Democratic congressional staffers who were, in contrast to many of their bosses, overwhelmingly anti-Israel.

That was indicative of the sea change in American politics with respect to Israel that has been going on. It has long been apparent that the left wing of the Democratic Party has been influenced by woke ideology and the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism teachings, and thus, increasingly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. But a tipping point has been reached since Oct. 7.

That was made clear in the most recent Gallup poll of attitudes toward Israel broken down by party affiliation. In the recent past, there had been a growing split among Democrats on the issue. In the last two years, however, that has shifted into a stance in which the party’s members are now clearly against the Jewish state. The survey published last month showed that Democrats favored the Palestinians over Israel by a stunning 59% to 21% margin. By contrast, Republicans side with Israel by an even larger 75% to 10% margin with independents backing the Jewish state over the Palestinians by 42% to 34%.

So, it’s hardly surprising that Democratic officeholders are hostile to Israel or that they have opposed Trump’s efforts to crack down on colleges and universities that have enabled or appeased pro-Hamas mobs that targeted Jewish students. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has always disingenuously claimed to be an ardent supporter of Israel and antisemitism, refused to allow a vote in the Senate last fall on the Antisemitism Awareness Act that codified the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of the term into federal law for fear of offending a major constituency of his party.

A state of denial

It’s a shame that Israel has become a partisan issue. The blame for that belongs to the Democrats, who have shifted to the left on that issue as they have on so many others in recent decades while the GOP, which a half-century ago was divided on the Jewish state, has now become almost a lockstep pro-Israel party.

That doesn’t excuse the hiring of Wilson and DeMino, or the way people like Carlson remain relevant on the right. Yet it’s long past time for Jewish Democrats to stop pretending that support for Israel is mainstream in their party, or that Trump and the GOP—whatever you might otherwise think about them—aren’t stalwart supporters of the Jewish state and the American Jewish community. Antisemitism still exists on the right, but the primary threat to Jews in the United States now comes from woke activists, academics and officeholders who have made opposition to Israel and the toleration of Jew-hatred the new orthodoxy on the left. To claim otherwise is not just hypocritical for those who were silent about what happened under Biden. It’s to be in a state of denial that is as tragic as it is wrongheaded.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

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