Former President Donald Trump on Sunday night shared a post on his Truth Social platform that accused “liberal Jews” of voting to “destroy” America and Israel.
“Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives!” said the post, which came on the weekend of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”
The post touted Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, among other moves.
It is unclear what prompted his post. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Prominent Jewish advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, J Street and the American Jewish Committee, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michelle Terris, the founder of JEXIT, an organization that says its mission is to “educate and encourage” Jewish Americans to exit the Democratic Party, confirmed to NBC News that Trump’s post came from a JEXIT flyer posted Sunday on Instagram.
Terris said it was her organization’s understanding that Trump shared the post to his Truth Social account after a meeting with board member Siggy Flicker last weekend.
“We believe he shared it on Truth Social because he is so proud of his record of support for the Jewish community in America and for the State of Israel,” Terris said.
“We are thankful to the former President for sharing it on his Truth Social account,” she added. “As our post states, there has been no greater friend to American Jews and the State of Israel than fmr. President Donald J. Trump and we are deeply concerned that many Liberal Jews in America do not recognize the fmr. President’s history of accomplishments in supporting our people and instead vote blinding for the Democratic Party.”
Trump’s post, however, plays into antisemitic tropes that American Jews have dual loyalties to the U.S. and Israel and mirror his past remarks claiming broad support in Israel for his policies, in contrast with many Jewish voters in the U.S., who often vote Democratic.
The former president last year faced backlash for saying that Jews in the U.S. needed to “get their act together” and “appreciate” Israel “before it is too late.”
“No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last year.
“Those living in Israel, though, are a different story — Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be P.M.!” he continued.
Some critics viewed Trump’s comments at the time as a threat to the Jewish community.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt accused Trump of “Jewsplaining” in a tweet: “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting.”
The Jerusalem Post’s then-editor-in-chief, Yaakov Katz, tweeted: “Nothing to see here. Just a former US president using threatening language about American Jews at a time when antisemitism is on a global rise.”
Retired Army Col. Alexander Vindman, in a tweet, accused Trump of “executing the fascist playbook to turn his mob on Jews.”
In an interview in 2021, Trump also said, “The Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.”
“I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country,” said Trump, who won strong support from white evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump also came under fire for his remarks in response to the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, white nationalists and neo-Nazis carried tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” among other slogans.
Trump said in remarks to the media after the rally: “You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, they should be condemned totally — you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
Trump continued to defend his remarks on the white nationalist rally after Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign in 2019 and slammed Trump’s response to Charlottesville. Trump reiterated that he was referring to one reason for the gathering, the removal of the monument to Lee, a Confederate general, from a city park.
“If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” he said in 2019. “And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
Trump’s team also had to do damage control last year after a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who was under fire for making antisemitic remarks — and a white supremacist, Nick Fuentes.
Trump said he didn’t know the identity of Fuentes, a known Holocaust denier, who unexpectedly arrived with the rapper.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
