Donald Trump wants Jewish voters to abandon Democrats. Last week, he unleashed a rant intended to shame every Jew who is backing President Biden in this year’s election.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel and, frankly, should be spoken to,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee declared.
The New York Times describes Trump’s latest shots at Jewish voters lined up with Biden as the “third time in the last month [he] has cast aspersions on” Jews who support Biden.
The latest blitz, however, went beyond insulting to demeaning.
“Any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined,” Trump said.
The political pitfall in Trump’s strategy is that polls show most Americans are having difficulty with Israel’s conduct of its fighting in the Gaza Strip.
A late March Gallup poll found that 55 percent of Americans oppose the devastating Israel Defense Force approach, specifically the high number of deaths among civilians and even humanitarian aid workers in Gaza.
Once-strong support for Israel’s response to a terror attack is declining among members of “all three major party groups,” over Israel’s current handling of the war, according to Gallup. Gallup found that support for the war among Democrats fell by 18 percentage points, and among Republicans by 7 points.
Trump appears to be aware of those polls. He has even admitted to being “amazed at how many people are in those marches,” of Americans calling for the protection of Palestinian civilians.
His response to the polls has been to continue assailing Biden while offering muted criticism of Israel.
“Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. Get it over with,” he advised Israel, speaking on a radio show hosted by Hugh Hewitt. Then he added: “Israel is absolutely losing the PR war.”
It is also worth noting that Trump was an early critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, blaming Israeli’s intelligence agencies as well as political leadership for not preventing the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists.
But now Trump has pushed his past critiques into the background while trying to strip Jewish voters away from Biden and Democrats.
It is along the same lines as his efforts to lower support for Democrats among Black Americans. In fact, Trump has tied the two political attacks together.
“Jewish people, by habit, they vote for the Democrat, and Black people by habit vote for the Democrats,” he recently said. With Black voters, he has run onto slippery ground by suggesting that a criminal mug shot won him support in that cohort — as if most black people were tied to criminals.
Similarly, his efforts to reduce Jewish support have Trump on dangerous ground. Anyone who votes for Democrats must “hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel with will be destroyed,” Trump said recently.
That led Senate Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to charge Trump with exploiting an antisemitic “trope of dual loyalty,” by which American Jews are not patriotic Americans but primarily locked into Israeli interests.
Trump is voicing “a textbook example of the kinds of antisemitism facing Jews,” Schumer said.
An even bigger problem with Trump’s grab for Jewish support is that he is lining up against Jewish politicians with a long history of supporting Israel. Those Jewish politicians disproportionately represent Jewish voters, and polls show close to 70 percent of Jewish voters identify as Democrats.
There are 10 Jewish senators, including independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who caucuses with the Democrats. There are no Jewish Republicans in the Senate.
In the House, there are 27 Jewish representatives — 25 Democrats and 2 Republicans.
Schumer represents the more than 20 percent of American Jews who live in New York, his home state. With all those Jewish voters watching him, Schumer, long a strong advocate for Israel, gave a speech in the Capitol calling for elections in Israel, out of concern, he said, that Israel risks becoming a global “pariah” due to poor leadership by Netanyahu.
The Hill’s Alexander Bolton recently surveyed the leaders of Jewish political groups and wrote that Schumer has “avoided serious political blowback for his landmark” speech.
Attempts by Trump and other Republicans to deny Biden Jewish political support also include telling right-wing media that young liberals with empathy for Palestinians are fracturing the Democratic coalition and will lead him to victory over Biden and the Democrats in November.
“Biden is convinced his polls will improve by attacking Israel and embracing Hamas supporters like Rashida Tlaib,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) posted on X. “He must hear from the majority of Americans who stand with Israel against Hamas.”
But it is Trump who is ignoring widespread concern about the war undermining future support for Israel among Americans.
It is Trump who is ignoring Jewish voters who have genuine concerns about Israel’s crushing military offensive weakening worldwide support for Israel at a time of growing concern about fighting to escalate in the Middle East.
Trump might better use his energy to get his supporters in Congress to stop holding up U.S. aid to Israel as part of his gameplaying on Ukraine and border security.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.