Republican Anti-Semitism: Trump, Ye and Fox News
Character is Destiny. Marie Brenner’s account of Donald Trump’s greasy fascination with Adolf Hitler in the September 1990 issue of Vanity Fair should be required reading for beltway political journos. From the article:
(In April 1990), perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
Busted, as they say. And Trump’s response to being confronted with his little Nazi nighttime reading regimen is to want to get back at the rat-fink that opened his pie-hole to Vanity Fair. That is vintage Trump, who I have been writing about for over a decade. This is this character. And Character, the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus reminds us from across the sea of time, is Destiny …
There is another unfortunate postscript to the story. Over one year later, Donald J. Trump, one of the most noxious characters in the New York media landscape I have ever written about, had his revenge on journalist Marie Brenner. On Dec. 10, 1991, Tina Brown noted in her Diary, Trump poured a glass of wine down the back of Brenner at an NYC Parks black-tie gala at Tavern on the Green. “Other guests at the table started pointing and yelping, ‘Oh my God! Look what he just did!’” Brown writes, clearly appalled. “The ‘he’ in question was Donald Trump! She saw his familiar Elvis coif making off across the Crystal Room.”
Which brings me to Kanye, or Ye’s own anti-Semitism. Prior to his cancellation, Ye was sanctified and blessed by Tucker Carlson, who has the second most-watched show in cable news. As if that weren’t horrific enough, a mole leaked to Vice News the toxic anti-Semitic slop from that interview that couldn’t make it on air. Fox News executives, according to Confider, are closing in on the mole. Because — hunt the leaker, not the bigots.
This, of course, reminds me of Trump asking Marie Brenner “Who told you that?” The Fox News reaction to the Too-Anti-Semitic-For-TV B roll footage is “Let’s get the rat-fuck that opened his pie-hole.” What’s a little anti-Semitism on the most racist racist show in the history of TV news?
Back to Trump. By mid-October, Trump was back in his own anti-Semitic groove, panties in a bunch, complaining on his grotty little social media platform Truth Social, that American Jews are insufficiently grateful to his Flatulence. “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump complained, adding, “our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.” Finally, adding, ominously, that American Jews need to “get their act together … before it is too late.”
Is that the Trump platform in ‘24? Because, if it is, the Republican Party will probably adopt it as is. The sound of Republicans condemning Trump for his anti-Semitic posts is the sound of crickets …
“French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz … are struggling to rekindle the magic of Franco-German unity.” (Bloomberg)
“Netanyahu, Trump’s fellow aspiring autocrat, not only prefers Trump to Democrats, but agrees with the notion that (the often antisemitic) right-wing Christian Zionists, not the (mostly liberal) American Jewish community, constitute Israel’s ‘best friends’ in this country, and so is cool with the forms of antisemitism that reinforce this idea.” (Eric Alterman/The American Prospect)
UCLA TV Diversity Report: White Male Show Creators Tend To Get Bigger Budgets (Deadline)
Elon Musk is already cutting executives at Twitter. (Charlie Warzel)
When Adnan Khashoggi got on a private plane, you went wherever he wanted you to go. (Christina Oxenberg)