The real reason Donald Trump is pushing this ‘Democrats hate Jews’ nonsense
Donald Trump and his Republican Party are working harder than ever to push the notion that the Republican Party is on the side of Jewish people, while the Democratic Party doesn’t stand with Jewish people. In fact Trump said as much in exact words today when he told a group of assembled reporters that the Democrats are “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish.” But Jewish people aren’t buying this, and even Trump knows that. So what’s he really doing?
All you have to do is look at the numbers to see that Trump and the GOP have no chance of winning the Jewish vote by pushing this rhetoric. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the Democratic candidate has received at least two-thirds of the Jewish vote in every U.S. presidential election since 1992.
In fact, since Donald Trump entered politics, the Jewish vote has skewed even more heavily toward the Democrats. Trump spent the 2016 election claiming to be pro-Israel, but his opponent Hillary Clinton ended up receiving 71% of the Jewish vote. After Trump spent two years pushing his pro-Israel stance as president, Pew Research says that the Democratic Party received 79% of the Jewish vote in the 2018 midterm elections.
In other words, Donald Trump has made the Republican Party even less appealing to Jewish voters than ever. So why even bother trying? Trump, or at least his handlers, know it’s not going to work. Anecdotally, it’s easy to find quite a large number of conservative evangelical Christians who insist that the Republican Party is the pro-Israel party. Push them further, and some of them will acknowledge that siding with Israel is their way of standing up against Islam. In a number of conservative evangelical circles, Islam is absurdly viewed as the single greatest threat to Christianity and to America.
It doesn’t matter to conservative evangelicals that back in the real world, the vast majority of Jewish voters are rejecting Trump and the GOP, and are voting Democrat in the hope of stopping Trump’s agenda. You can spend all day pointing out that most Jews don’t see Trump as being pro-Jew, and it doesn’t faze them. Trump surely knows this. He isn’t pushing the ‘Democrats hate Jews’ rhetoric because he thinks it’ll land him the Jewish vote. He’s doing it to help solidify his conservative evangelical Christian base.
Part of that disconnect comes from the fact that Israel is currently controlled by far-right conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Trump ally who is currently under criminal indictment. Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth summed it up best today when he tweeted “I’m not going to the AIPAC Conference, and not only am I pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, I AM Jewish. I’m also anti-Netanyahu and anti-Trump.”
