A Shove Disguised As a Hug

It was back in early January 2019, just days after the swearing-in of the 116th Congress, that the concept of “dual loyalty” made another appearance in American politics. At question was a tweet by freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) criticizing a vote to condemn the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. “They forgot which country they represent,” Tlaib wrote of the bill’s advocates.

In March, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) came under fire for similar comments. When referencing, in a meeting with supporters, what she viewed as undue influence by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, Omar declared, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Politicians across the political spectrum condemned the remarks, not least among them President Trump, who has returned to them often, going after both representatives in increasingly harsh statements. But here is where the story pivots. While it would seem an embrace of American Jews, this President would eventually utilize the same trope to exclude Jews. While in this light it might seem ironic, Trump’s vision of the country, built on exclusion, actually makes antisemitism a necessary inclusion in his attempts to narrow the definition of what it means to be fully American.

Let’s back up to be sure we understand the ramifications of what might, at first, seem to be just cable news bric-a-brac. Charges of disloyalty, or dual loyalty, have a serious history that has effected real consequences. In the words of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the trope—relying on the idea that Jews, rather than being entirely invested in their country of residence, hold a simultaneous allegiance “to their coreligionists around the world or to a secret and immoral Jewish agenda”—has “been used to harass, marginalize, and persecute the Jewish people for centuries.”

And with this in mind, it is not difficult to see why the President’s recent comments caused such an uproar. Speaking in an Oval Office press conference about Democratic support for Tlaib and Omar—whose planned trip to Israel had been canceled in seeming response to Trump’s public opposition—he remarked, “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” And though the object of such “disloyalty” was at first vague, Trump clarified the next day: Democratic Jews are, in his mind, “very disloyal to Israel.”

This clarification was, in the minds of surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, a vindicating defense. As Yair Rosenberg pointed out in The Washington Post, that Trump casts allegiance to Israel as a positive attribute, rather than a negative, is indeed “an inversion of the traditional dual loyalty trope.” But this certainly does not make it any less harmful; the underlying premise remains that Jewish Americans are—to be blunt—strangers in a foreign land. Trump insinuates that Jews are somehow Israeli, even if they, in point of fact, are not.

The messy truth is that antisemitism remains a pervasive element of society that is not constrained to a particular political ideology. To recognize that and, in the words of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, “stop using Jews as a political football” is a necessary step in improving life for Jews in America. Yet to leave it there, claiming both sides are equally to blame, is myopic; there is a fundamental difference here.

While Trump claims “Representatives Omar and Tlaib are the face of the [Democratic] Party,” this simply is not true. It was just last month that Democrats voted against their advocated stance and for a House resolution opposing the BDS movement, the caucus supporting it by a 209-16 margin. Omar and Tlaib are Democratic Congresswomen, certainly, but—while they have captured media attention—they hold little influence over party-level decisions, and their views are not shared by the Democratic mainstream.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is the leader of his party, and his ideology is quickly becoming mainstream Republican thought, a trend only intensified by the widespread departure of moderates from the party apparatus. It is a continuation of years of asymmetric polarization, to use the technical term, which now seemingly extends to antisemitism, too.

For Trump, it appears his politics of exclusion is a machine he can’t effectively turn off. Even in an attempt to appeal to a minority group, he reminded them, and the rest of us, that true belonging is never fully available to them. Trump’s focus on bolstering white sociopolitical power—though targeted initially at Muslims and Hispanics—has come to encompass Jews as yet another component of the Other.

The centuries-long history of the Jewish diaspora is one of arrival, a tentative inclusion, and then exclusion—often through horrific violence. Yet, even as immigrant Jews faced discrimination—even as American presidents privately held antisemitic ideas—America seemed to be the exception. That the country’s ideals valued a civic religion more than race or creed gave hope that, finally, this was a place where Jews could be welcomed, could be at home; it gave hope that exclusion would never come.

With a President who so openly contradicts those ideals, such hope seems in ever increasing doubt.