Donald Trump recently said that all American Jews should vote for him. There is a strong argument for the opposite.
As a Jew who grew up in the 1950s, the horror of the Holocaust was part of recent history for me. The real question is why any Jew, remembering the Holocaust, would support someone who uses migrants the same way Hitler used Jews — as the source of all evil and a danger to the country. Yet that is precisely what Trump has been doing.
How did Hitler speak about Jews? They were “poisoning the blood” of true Germans. They were agents of evil, like rats and cockroaches. They were attacking German men, women and children. And they were implicated in the Germany’s ultimate humiliation, the treacherous surrender in World War I. All of this was part of an effort to treat Jews as non-human.
Now let’s look at how Trump describes migrants. He calls them murderers who are the source of his claimed rise in violent crime. They too are “poisoning the blood of our country.” They are eating our pets. They are attacking villages and cities in America. They have bad genes. And, according to Trump, migrants are the cause of any economic woes that people are feeling. He too is trying to dehumanize migrants by spewing dangerous lies.
And Trump’s stated remedy is also a chilling reminder of the past: Round up all undocumented immigrants, and even remove the legal status of many of those living here legally, and send them to detention camps to await deportation. Not only would such a mass deportation program create a humanitarian crisis — what, for example, about the more than 5 million U.S. citizen children living with undocumented parents — but it would severely damage the country’s economy.
According to the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, such a deportation program would cause a decline in domestic economic growth by between 1.2 percent and 7.4 percent by 2028, potentially costing the economy more than $1 trillion. Moreover, studies show that if a mass deportation program were implemented, employment of legal workers would actually decline; key industries like construction, agriculture and hospitality would face severe worker shortages; and inflation would increase. And apprehending those purportedly in the country illegally and building the needed detention facilities would cost American taxpayers more than $300 billion.
As always, Trump’s rhetoric is filled with lies. The crime rate among undocumented immigrants is lower than the crime rate in the general population. Other countries are not emptying their jails to send us criminals. Migrants are not eating our pets, they don’t have bad genes and they are not poisoning our blood. And they are not the source of economic hardship being felt by any American.
The reality, however, is that while Trump is wholly unqualified to be president, he is an effective demagogue, leading way too many to buy into his poisonous narrative.
It seems that Trump wants us Jews to ignore all of this and vote for him because he is allegedly a better supporter of Israel than Biden or Vice President Harris. This ignores the enormous support that the administration has provided Israel, including by marshalling a multinational effort to defend Israel from Iranian attack.
It also suggests that supporting Israel means never criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and how he has responded to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. It is difficult, however, to try to condemn such criticisms when his government includes a minister who was convicted of inciting racism against Israeli Arabs and has idolized the killing of Palestinians; and also includes another minister who, among other things, thinks Israel should have expelled all Arabs from the country in 1948; and who oversees a response that has killed more than 40,000 Gazans and created a humanitarian nightmare.
More significantly, the notion that American Jews need to value support for Israel over their allegiance to the U.S. fosters the antisemitic notion that Jews are not true Americans. And, as the Anti-Defamation League has made clear, Trump’s claim that Jews should be blamed if he loses the election only further risks inflaming antisemitism.
No American, and certainly no Jewish American, should tolerate a campaign that demonizes and dehumanizes a group of people in an effort to secure power. We can look back in history and see how dangerous such an effort can be. A presidential election should be a debate of ideas and policies in which inciting hatred for a targeted group has no place.
Richard J. Davis is an attorney. He was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration and an assistant Watergate special prosecutor.