What’s for dinner
Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. A 2024 candidate broke bread with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Ye, who has praised Hitler. One of the rare white supremacists with popular name recognition, Fuentes has suggested that Jews leave the country and that what’s for dinner military be sent into Black neighborhoods. Last modified on Fri 2 Dec 2022 11.
Let’s be clear about what happened and what didn’t happen on 22 November at Mar-a-Lago. A former president of the United States, a self-declared candidate for reelection in 2024, had dinner with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose antisemitic public statements have grown increasingly extreme, along with Nick Fuentes, who is among the nation’s most vocal Holocaust deniers. Ye was bringing some friends to dinner, and no one had the faintest idea who they were. That is, unless the host’s idea of a friend and ideal guest is a celebrity who flatters him when he’s not making nasty racist threats. Antisemitic incidents and hate speech have grown more common in recent years.
Fifteen years ago, at a cocktail party in Rome, an American woman told me and two friends that her son couldn’t get a job in Hollywood because Jews controlled the entertainment industry. All these years later, I can still remember our shock at what she’d said, and at the fact that we’d said nothing in response. We know what was supposed to be funny: the familiar trope, the undying zombie of Jewish media control. But what was surprising was how readily the studio audience laughed. Laughing at an antisemitic joke in a TV studio, or anywhere, is pretty much the definition of normalization.
And normalization is the Petri dish in which the virus of racial and religious hatred grows, which it inevitably does. One of the bleaker lessons of history is how regularly the hatred of the other spills out of the culture medium and erupts into mass violence. Obviously, the gap between Chappelle’s monologue and the Nuremberg laws is a huge one. Jewish star, searching the landscape, with telescopes, for a corner of the earth where no one reads Der Stürmer.
Some of Trump’s Jewish supporters might approve of his stance on Israel but wonder if, in the future, they want to be expelled from an all-Christian judenfrei American theocracy and forced to emigrate to Tel Aviv. Donald Trump, there are only two explanations. Or two: they have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong, no decency. The only thing that drives them is the fear of losing supporters and of risking the goodwill of a candidate whom someday they might need to ask for help.
