The Return of Trump—VII

Dahlia Krutkovich • Omer Bartov • Catherine Coleman Flowers • Joshua Craze

Dahlia Krutkovich

Bad-faith accusations of antisemitism on American campuses are not new, but they have exploded with new force in the last year. One example: this April a Yale student shared a video she took at a campus Palestine solidarity demonstration. Surrounded by a group of protest marshals who block her off from the rank-and-file, she films the participants, who chant about university divestment while walking by. One waves a Palestinian flag at the camera, at which point she yells “Ow! Ow! You stabbed—!” Writing the next day for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, the student described the incident as an expression of wanton identity-based violence: “I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.” She reported that she had a headache for much of the following day but that she sustained no lasting damage. Five months earlier, she had come to prominence for complaining that the school cafeteria’s “years-old, popular ‘Israeli couscous salad with spinach and tomatoes’” had been renamed “couscous salad with spinach and tomatoes.”

Neither of these incidents might have seemed terribly serious, let alone evidence of systematic antisemitic animus on Yale’s campus. Right-wing media and Israel watchdog groups, however, reported the two dust-ups as, respectively, an attack on a Jewish student at a Palestine rally and the campus censorship of Israeli culture. Such accounts likely helped persuade an unnamed friend of the billionaire Bill Ackman not to write a recommendation letter for a prospective applicant because the school was, as he put it, was “no different than Hamas,” and “potentially even more dangerous.” (The university’s brief encampment, a protest at the Harvard–Yale football game, and a hunger strike by students all surely also helped.) Ackman’s friend is clearly worried about “the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jew-haters attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government,” as the Heritage Foundation describes them in its recent report “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.”

Project Esther suggests that, in Trump’s second term, the debate around who American Jews are—and what constitutes a threat to them—will only get more attenuated and absurd. Released on October 7, 2024, as an addendum to Project 2025, the policy group’s roadmap for the next Trump administration, the document proposes ways to dismantle a range of “pro-Hamas” groups, from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) to “Jewish Voices [sic] for Peace.” Such groups, it alleges, are “taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency” to effect a far-reaching agenda. According to Project Esther, they want not only “to compel the United States government to change its long-standing policy of support for Israel” but to bring about “the destruction of capitalism and democracy” in America.

To stop JVP and other “Hamas Support Organizations,” which belong to a “global Hamas Support Network,” the plan suggests leveraging the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA, a 1938 anti-Nazi law that requires agents of foreign governments to register with the Department of Justice), the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, a 1970 statute originally intended to combat organized crime but which has recently been used to prosecute activists associated with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement), immigration law, and counterterrorism law. Project Esther alleges that OSF, JVP, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Tides Foundation, and others are likely materially connected to “Middle Eastern regimes” and possibly even Hamas itself. It’s now up to the federal government to marshal the resources to establish these ties. The relationships in question are in all likelihood extremely tenuous, if they exist at all, but successive (or simultaneous) DOJ, IRS, or FBI investigations may do enough to strangle groups like JVP and SJP. Those organizations have assembled much of the national protest infrastructure since the start of the war on Gaza, which a number of experts have identified as a genocide.

The plan is circuitous and poorly written. It includes a rueful reference to the “Reformed” Jewish movement, which “supported—even led—a multitude of liberal causes célèbres, including pro-Palestine organizations,” and rhapsodizes about “Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman, and Meyer ‘Mickey’ Cohen,” who “happily coordinated ‘less than kosher’ activities” to fight American Nazi groups, “sometimes at the behest of their rabbis.” It says nothing about how to combat hatred of Jews as Jews, which is seeing new life in the US, evinced in the spread of social media theories about our control of the “deep state”, the Covid-19 virus being engineered to spare people of Ashkenazi ancestry, or that Israel’s moral bankruptcy can find its origins in the Talmud.

It’s hard to say how much notice Project Esther will receive at Mar-a-Lago. Jewish Insider reported that several of the conservative groups who were invited to participate in its drafting have distanced themselves from the “well-meaning effort” because it lacks credibility. Nonetheless, the strategies it lays out are not new and certainly not unpopular: over the last twenty years, pro-Israel activists and groups have agitated for a more active state intervention against anti-Zionist activism. On their own, groups like Accuracy in Media, Canary Mission, and Campus Reform have accumulated a wealth of data on protestors, funding apparatuses, and university administrations—data any three-letter agency can readily use.

Project Esther says nothing about other mechanisms likely to figure prominently in the second Trump administration’s clampdown on Palestine activism: tighter restrictions on boycotts, revocation of tax-exempt status for nonprofits designated “terrorist supporting organizations,” or punitive enforcements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which blocks federal funding to schools found to host a “hostile environment” for students on the basis of race or national origin. Trump himself has promised to “defend Jewish citizens” by revoking federal tax dollars for all schools promoting “antisemitic propaganda.” To close a Title VI investigation, schools need to negotiate a resolution with the federal government. In the last fourteen months pro-Israel groups have filed dozens of complaints with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and even some federal lawsuits alleging that Jewish students have been harassed and intimidated for their Zionist politics, which they view as expressions of their Jewish identity and heritage. (After settling one such lawsuit, New York University amended its student conduct guidelines to state that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity” and should be protected as such.) Other activists, Jewish and not, have for years resisted the total conflation of Zionism, a political ideology, and Judaism, a religion. Now that conflation seems poised to triumph.

Project Esther’s larger ideological vision suggests that the tactics it outlines could be used against any perceived fifth column. The document makes this quite explicit: its stated goal is not only to “protect…American Jewry” but also to safeguard “the sanctity of the core values derived from our Founding documents.” Along with Jewish gangsters and their rabbis, the document waxes nostalgic about the House of Representative’s Committee on Un-American Activities. Trump’s own promise could also be seen as a commitment to retaliating against universities, one of the last spheres of society where the left has a foothold. Project Esther vows to use every “academic, social, legal, financial” tool of America’s “open society” to tamp down on what it calls antisemitism. But how can a society where actors across all fields of public and private life coordinate to quash dissent—against the conduct of an American ally using American weapons and American money to prosecute a brutal war—be called anything other than closed?

Omer Bartov

There was nothing accidental about Trump’s triumph. The writing has been on the wall for at least a generation. But with the important exception of Bernie Sanders, very few Democrats paid attention. The party exhibited a remarkable lack of imagination, a willful blindness, and an astonishing obliviousness toward the past. For far too long they have focused narrowly on the politics of culture as an escape from facing up to deteriorating social and material conditions. Following their defeat, they have shown no evidence of engaging in serious introspection, preferring the usual recriminations, told-you-so’s, and other forms of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The party would do well to confront some basic facts. Inequality of wealth in the United States since President Johnson’s Great Society has grown inexorably, to a level higher than in almost any other developed country. Between 1963 and 2022 the wealthiest families increased their wealth from thirty-six to seventy-one times that of middle-class families. The debt owed by the lowest 5 percent has increased by a factor of four, compared to a sevenfold growth in the wealth of the top 5 percent. This has a direct impact on, among other things, education. Only half of lower income families attend college, compared to almost 90 percent of the well-off. There is a vast regional disparity in quality of education, and elite schools charge exorbitant tuition fees. Unsurprisingly, a third of the SAT takers who achieve top scores belong to the top one percent of wealth, making them thirteen times more likely to succeed than those in the bottom 20 percent of income.

Large parts of the American middle class can no longer afford homes; their salaries typically do not keep up with the cost of living; they no longer expect to surpass the wealth of their parents. They can imagine that their children’s future will be worse than their own, not least in view of the environmental devastation and economic turmoil that will accompany climate change. For decades they have been celebrated as the backbone of American democracy and progress—but for tens of millions that progress has decisively stalled. Could anyone believe that in the long run people would simply accept that all this was the natural order of things? That this was the temporary price of a capitalist economy from which everyone would eventually profit?

Donald Trump likely could not care less what led to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. But he has the same instincts as that period’s populist demagogues, and now he is surrounded by people who do know about that past and seem to have a taste for reenacting it. Fascism in Germany, Italy, France, Britain, and the United States, as well as several East European countries, emerged from widespread popular disillusionment with capitalism and socialism. Capitalism was good for ever fewer, and bad not only for ever-growing numbers of working-class people but also for members of the middle class, who had hoped to rise up the social ladder only to find themselves plunging to the bottom amid rising inflation and unemployment. Socialism, for its part, had for many acquired the face of a violent, dictatorial Stalinism in the Soviet Union that simultaneously sought to use local communist parties in such countries as Germany and France to eradicate their liberal democracies as well. Fascism, in this setting, offered the masses a third path: putting the condescending intelligentsia in their place; removing foreigners, misfits, the handicapped, and the work-shy from the streets and from the state; dignifying soldiers and laborers; giving the nation’s children a decent, healthy, and safe education.

This was an attractive proposition, although it came wrapped in tyranny and racism, violence and strongman rhetoric. For a while it worked, at least for the majority of the healthy, heterosexual, Christian members of the dominant nationality, who gained decent jobs, housing, social services, dignity, and national pride. The Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, and the mentally ill were, after all, the minority. We know where it all ended.

The social democracies created in Europe after World War II, and the vast social and education reforms undertaken in the US during the same period, were based on an understanding that capitalism, left to its devices, can dig its own grave, as it did so well in the interwar period. But that lesson has been forgotten, and now social injustice, political corruption, and elite hypocrisy are again on the rise in Europe and the United States, with the predictable consequences.

There may not be time left to correct course. But those of us who want to prevent the coming catastrophe should nonetheless try to think in practical terms about how to restructure American society—and above all about the redistribution of wealth. Millions of people in the US are painfully aware that they have been left behind in the past decades. They want a change. If they were offered affordable housing, better health care, good education, reliable social services, secure jobs, and prospects for advancement—and if there were still a system in place for their voices to be heard—they just might come to see Trumpism’s lies and manipulations for what they are.

Catherine Coleman Flowers

On Monday, Veteran’s Day, I was traveling through Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. My male companion that day and I are both veterans, but only he happened to be wearing gear—an Air Force hat. Over the course of the day, people acknowledged him for his service. It occurred to me that whenever I go shopping, the vast majority of the gear I see on sale for veterans seems to have been made for men. Those of us women who also served tend more often to go unmarked and unnoticed.

I am from a family that swore on more than one occasion to support and defend the United States Constitution. My grandfather served in World War II and my father in the Korean War. They both believed in supporting the imperfect in pursuit of the perfect, in advancing civil rights, and in extending democracy to all American citizens. Inspired by their legacy, my three brothers and I all joined the military at various points during the post-Vietnam era. I enlisted in the US Air Force.

Yet sometimes I feel invisible, as a veteran and as a woman. During this election cycle, too many victorious candidates have relied on the kind of hate speech, racism, and misogyny that my family hoped to send to hell many years ago. Then, two days after the vote, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, whom Donald Trump has tapped as his nominee for defense secretary, disparaged women servicemembers. “We should not have women in combat roles,” he told a podcast host. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

When the Constitution was written, women were second-class citizens and Black people were treated as chattel. Only white men that owned property could vote. Yet this imperfect document was expanded over the years to become more perfect. If we are to survive in the years ahead as a nation that represents democracy and opportunity for all, regardless of their gender or the color of their skin, we must continue to pursue the perfect. We must also cast out the demons that seek to destroy those values, and extend the blessings of liberty widely, just like my family—the real patriots—did before me.

Joshua Craze

In April I went to Washington, D.C., to brief American policymakers about the war in Sudan. More than ten million people had fled in the world’s largest displacement crisis, and millions were at risk of famine. But up on Capitol Hill, the conflict felt like an inconvenience. There was an election to win. Foreign policy attention was focused on securing backing for Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Democrats made some gestures of concern for Sudan—belatedly appointing a special envoy in February 2024 and funding a slow drip of humanitarian aid. But the country was merely an appendage to broader foreign policy goals: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a US ally, supports one of the principal belligerents in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The UAE, one veteran security official explained to me, is a central pillar of America’s overall plan for the Middle East and the Gulf. The Democrats and Republicans alike want to erect a trade and security edifice upheld by the UAE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, to resist Iran. During Trump’s last presidency, he pushed the Emirates to sign the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. (Trump sweetened the deal by promising to sell the UAE F-35 fighter jets). In October 2023 the US used the Al Dhafra Airbase, which hosts the Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, to launch strikes on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Syria. Seen from this perspective, Sudan is peripheral. The RSF might be massacring thousands, but that doesn’t matter geopolitically.

Biden’s indifference to Sudan was generally true for the continent writ large: he hasn’t made a single presidential visit to Africa. In one sense this is perplexing. During the Biden presidency, his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs arguing that the US was taking the lead in global development and humanitarian assistance. This should have made Africa a prime target for engagement. By 2100 the continent will likely account for 35–40 percent of the world’s population. Since 2014 global GDP per capita has risen 15 percent, but in Africa it has fallen 10 percent. In 2022 two-thirds of the people facing acute food insecurity across the globe lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. In much of the Sahel, the state is a shell, with little administrative capacity. In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as the Sudans, are witnessing brutal conflicts. In theory, the US is well positioned to help address these challenges. It has a string of military bases across the continent—a legacy of two decades of counterterrorism operations—and controls the global reserve currency. Yet from dozens of meetings with Biden administration officials, I got the impression that they were curiously rudderless, devoid of any sense of how to deal with the continent’s challenges.

What explains the lack of focus? The Biden administration addressed African political issues not on their own terms, but as ancillary to great power competition: the continent only mattered relative to China and Russia. As part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China built infrastructural projects across much of Africa. Russia’s Wagner group—now folded into its Africa Corps—installed itself in the Central African Republic and the Sahel, fighting rebel groups and running gold mines. Biden made a halfhearted attempt to counter these developments. His administration raised over $4 billion for the Lobito Corridor, a railway project designed to connect the eponymous Angolan port with Kolwezi, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has one of the largest mineral deposits in the world. It is intended to head off Chinese influence in Angola, a major oil producer. Yet the BRI—albeit reduced in recent years—is conceived on a grander scale. China does quadruple the volume of trade with Africa that the US does. America has also lost ground to Russia. Until 2023 the US was fighting jihadist rebels across the Sahel. That July, Niger’s presidential guard ousted President Mohamed Bazoum in a coup. The new military junta drew closer to Russia and demanded that American forces withdraw. In May 2024 Russian military personnel took over the airbase that once housed US soldiers.

Biden was following Trump’s lead in this curious combination of functionalism and disinterest. It was Trump’s first administration, after all, that had foregrounded great power competition in ways that echoed the Cold War. To the extent that Trump thought about what he called the “shithole countries” of Africa, it was only in the context of broader geopolitical concerns. In 2019 in Sudan a revolution brought down the country’s longstanding dictator, Omar al-Bashir; Trump prevaricated on supporting a joint civilian-military government until it agreed to normalize relations with Israel, fatally wounding the transitional process.

The next Trump administration is likely to remain indifferent to Africa. No one will benefit more from that indifference than the UAE, which is now the face of neocolonialism on the continent. It has been backing military forces in Libya and Sudan, buying up vast tracts of agricultural land in Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere (displacing local communities in the process), and establishing ports along the Red Sea. Its allies in the Trump administration will likely give it a free pass to pursue these objectives. The UAE and Qatar have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. (Kushner has pledged not to be involved in the next Trump administration, but he will surely wield influence.) Another crucial figure is Erik Prince, who is rumored to be close to Trump’s security team: the former head of Blackwater lives in Abu Dhabi and has based some of his companies there. He has the ear of President Mohammed bin Zayed, has trained Somali forces with UAE funding, and reportedly attempted to sell weapons to a UAE-backed Libyan warlord, Khalifa Haftar.

Trump might make one “proactive” policy decision as well: gutting USAID, the agency responsible for distributing America’s humanitarian aid budget. The US remains the principal funder of humanitarian activities across Africa. During his first term, Trump proposed pivoting from aid to loans, which is more in keeping with his transactional style of politics. The Heritage Foundation, in Project 2025, recommends further budget cuts, as well as entirely axing programs related to birth control, gender equality, and climate change.

This couldn’t happen at a more inopportune moment. Sudan is facing the worst famine the world has seen since the 1980s; its humanitarian appeal for 2024 is only 32 percent funded. Other countries in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa receive even less funding. Worse is to come. Sub-Saharan Africa is entering a debt crisis, as both China and private investors (including major US firms) call in external loans. Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia are severely affected—and these are the continental success stories.

Rather than think of Trump’s Africa policy, it is apposite to understand that there is no policy. The developmental dreams of the 1960s and 1970s seem very far away. We live in a political environment much closer to the nineteenth century: Africa is once again relegated to producing raw materials and being the site for Great Power competition. The consequences of this shift are unlikely to be contained on the continent. South Sudan has suffered extreme flooding, brought on by climate change; more than a million people were affected by flooding this year alone. Without intensive investment and development support, millions will soon flee from unlivable circumstances.

Trump will turn his back on the crisis. His administration plans to halt the US refugee program and extend a travel ban to Sudan and Somalia. The broad contours of these policies have been in place for over a decade: block African migration to the US and treat the continent as a security threat. In this, Biden’s and Trump’s administrations stand united.