How Donald Trump and JD Vance Should Respond to Rising Antisemitism

An irony of the Trump administration is that it has done more than any predecessor in recent memory to push back against antisemitism on the left, only to watch it rise on the political right.

The far-left in America views the Jews as among the “white” ruling class and seeks liberation from supposed Jewish oppressors. Meanwhile, the far-right questions the loyalty of American Jews, whom they view as powerful manipulators of the US government and inimical to “white America.”

Whereas pro-Jewish Christians take God’s Biblical injunction to Abraham — “I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee” — literally, a growing number of young Christians now subscribe to “replacement theology.” This antisemitic belief holds that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s “chosen people” and therefore bear no commitment to their well-being.

The rise of “replacement theology” within the American right has coincided with a resurgence of “replacement theory,” which argues that Jews and other minorities are systematically replacing White Christians in the US. These two canards – one theological, the other racial – have gained new purchase as the right’s traditional guardrails against antisemitism have eroded.

This antisemitism is not just creeping into the mainstream — it is rushing into it.

And the spread of antisemitism is aided by those who either refuse to address it, or even explicitly tolerate it, putting political expediency ahead of principles. This has been the case mostly on the left in recent years, as witnessed by the rise of Zohran Mamdani and his endorsement by prominent Democrats.

But the growing popularity of Tucker Carlson, who platforms antisemites like Nick Fuentes and recently declared that the people he hates most are Christian Zionists, is equally concerning.

That Kevin Roberts, who heads the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that Carlson will “always” be a friend casts a dark shadow over an institution long known for its prudent, sensible conservatism. Roberts is no William Buckley, the intellectual godfather of the modern American right, who distanced himself from the extremist John Birch society and made clear that antisemitism has no place in American conservatism.

There is nothing more dangerous to America than the growing normalization of antisemitism on both sides of the political divide. America’s embrace of the Jews — unlike the old world that expelled, ghettoized, marginalized, and murdered them — has been a pillar of American principles. And Jews, in turn, have embraced and loved America like no other nation that came before it, referring to it as the “golden state” and seeing in its liberal values their salvation from millennia of persecution.

Our greatest statesmen have all known that America is healthy when it gives full rights and respect to Jewish Americans.

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants,” George Washington wished the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790. America, he added, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Almost two centuries later, Ronald Reagan recalled that America’s divine providence is grounded in its shared Judeo-Christian heritage, observing that “Americans… are not Jews or Christians …. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still … a shining city on a hill.”

Conversely, an America in which there is no place for Jews, in which Jews are not seen as Americans or afforded the right to live freely as Jews, will be cast down from that hill.

If allowed to spread from the extremities into the bloodstream of American political discourse, antisemitism will surely devour and destroy the soul of our great nation, just as it has that of all those societies whom it has infected in the last century: Venezuela, Iran, the Soviet Union, Germany. These acts usually reflect, or are harbingers of, larger destructive forces.

Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest Western statesman of the 20th century (and, unsurprisingly, an object of derision by Carlson), understood this well when he decried anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia.

As JINSA President & CEO Michael Makovsky writes in Churchill’s Promised Land, Churchill employed an adage attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations dealt with the Jews.”

President Trump and Vice President Vance should follow in the footsteps of Washington and Reagan, ostracize this antisemitism, and restore America to its rightful place on the hill.