Trumpeteers, open your eyes and ears

How did we get here? One poll after another in 2025 has shown that roughly three-quarters of American Jews are so far to the left that they would like nothing better than to see this country disappear and the State of Israel along with it.

How else can we possibly interpret polls that consistently report that American Jews disapprove of Donald Trump and the job he is doing as president by a 3-to-1 margin? Opposing Trump, after all, is opposing America.

Apparently, I am among that huge majority, judging by the authors of the distressingly hateful and hurtful emails I receive from the “Trumpeteers” in our community. They really believe every word of that absurd paragraph with which I began this week’s column. They are human equivalents of the idols the psalmist speaks of in Psalms 115 and 135. The truth about Trump and his team is all around them, yet they “have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear.”

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Among the latest outrages was one that came when Trump-fawning FBI Director Kash Patel decided to end the bureau’s eight-decade-long ties with the Anti-Defamation League because it has the chutzpah to report on the vicious and at times violent antisemitism spewing forth from the far right.

Anyone who believes Patel did not have Trump urging him on is seriously misguided.

Patel announced the move in a post on X, the former Twitter. He wrote that James Comey, a predecessor as FBI director, “wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them.” This appalled Patel because the ADL is “a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans.” The ADL does not spy on anyone. All it does is track the activities of far-right extremist groups and individuals, document them, and then share its findings with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Absurdly, Patel considers that “spying,” which is why he ended his post this way: “That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”

What was actuallly disgraceful was Patel’s outpouring of hate toward the ADL. He has a history of attacking anyone in and out of government who considers the far right to be anything but the most loyal of Americans, as witness his 2023 New York Times bestseller “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.” What prompted him to tackle the ADL was its branding of the late Charlie Kirk as an antisemite, which Kirk surely was (see my September 19 column). For the same reason, Patel cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he called “a partisan smear machine.”

What made Patel’s ADL announcement an outrage was his timing. Patel could have cut ties to both the ADL and the SPLC at the same time, but he chose to separate the announcements by two days — and one does not need to “deep think” why he did so. The ADL announcement was made on October 1, meaning on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of our Jewish year. That surely was meant as a sign of contempt for the Jewish community, not just the ADL.

Understand what cutting both of those ties means for us. Civil rights advocates, Jewish and otherwise, warn that it will now be harder to combat Jew-hatred at a time when antisemitism is on the rise here. It will also make the FBI’s hate crime statistics unreliable and will also make the FBI’s anti-terrorism efforts more difficult generally. Almost certainly, it will undermine confidence in the FBI among Jews and others who are targets of the far right.

Patel, of course, denies that he has any animus toward Jews. So what if he tends to make public appearances side by side with people who are noted for their hatred of us? As he told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in January, “I don’t believe I’m guilty by association.”

I don’t believe that we should ever believe Patel, however. He even lied to the committee when asked about his association with Holocaust-denying far right influencer Stew Peters, someone who just this past April called for a “final solution” to remove Jews from the United States. Patel has appeared on Peters’ podcast eight times, yet he told the senators that he did not know this hate-monger. Peters himself angrily lashed out at Patel after that committee session. “Kash Patel is lying,” Peters told his podcast audience. “He absolutely does know who I am.” In fact, he said, he and Patel used to “constantly” exchange text messages, and significantly, they did so “via personal cell phones.”

Others within the Trump administration also appear in public with Holocaust deniers and anti-Jewish extremists.

Paul Ingrassia, the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, has connections with at least three known extremists.

The communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, Rachel Cauley, was an active defender of Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, who was sentenced to four years in federal prison for his participation in the January 6 insurrection. (Trump pardoned him shortly after returning to office last January.) Hale-Cusanelli is a known Nazi sympathizer and has even appeared in public dressed like Adolf Hitler.

Over at the Justice Department, Trump chose Ed Martin to be U.S. pardon attorney and director of DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group. Its stated purpose is to expose what the administration calls “politicized prosecutions” carried out in previous administrations. Critics insist that the group’s focus is to target Trump’s perceived political enemies.

Trump had previously made Martin interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In 2024, Martin presented an award to Hale-Cusanelli for promoting “God, family and country.” Martin hailed Hale-Cusanelli as “extraordinary” as both a man and a leader. That ceremony was held at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.

Then there is Kingsley Wilson, a deputy Defense Department press secretary, who has a history of antisemitic and extremist social media posts.

As Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told NPR earlier this year, “If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost, they wouldn’t be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration.”

Finally, there is Donald Trump himself. His penchant for speaking without thinking gives him away on many fronts time after time, including what he thinks of Jews. In July, for example, he said this to a crowd in Iowa: “No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.”

The JCPA, for one, denounced Trump for that statement, which it said was “among the most quintessentially antisemitic slurs,” adding that it was a ”deeply dangerous” statement to make.

Two words stand out in that statement because, in context, both words are considered to be “dog whistles.” The first word, bankers, seems innocuous, but in far right-speak “bankers” is a coded word to avoid saying “Jews” outright, while still signaling antisemitic ideas to sympathetic audiences.

Trump himself resorted to that dog whistle in a 2016 campaign ad, just days before that November election. The ad showed Hilary Clinton in front of a pile of money and a six-pointed star. The text said she “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty,” and it identified those “bankers”: financier George Soros, the then Federal Reserve chair and later Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein — all Jews.

“Shylock,” of course, refers to William Shakespeare’s greedy and evil Jewish moneylender in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Trump has a history filled with antisemitic phrases, images, and actions:

• On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017, just seven days into his new term, he deliberately deleted all references to our martyred Six Million from the statement the State Department’s Holocaust office had drafted for him.

• That year, too, he went 40 days without making a single comment about a sudden wave of antisemitism that the ADL called the worst since the 1930s.

• While visiting Poland in July 2017, Trump ended a presidential tradition going back to 1989 by declining to visit the Warsaw Ghetto memorial.

• In 2019, he neither commented on nor condemned the ramming of a pickup truck into a crowd of Jews demonstrating outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Rhode Island.

• Trump often suggests that he does not regard us as true Americans when he tells Jewish audiences that Israel is “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu is “your prime minister.”

As my email app next week will undoubtedly attest, the truth about Trump and his team is all around them, but the Trumpeteers “have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear.” Almost certainly, they will trumpet the fact that their hero got Hamas to free the hostages, whereas Biden did nothing to bring them home.

For the record, Hamas took 251 hostages on October 7. Several were released voluntarily early on. The IDF rescued some as well. Of the remainder, Biden helped secure the release of at least 138 hostages, alive and dead. Trump got the last 47 out in a negotiation that began in the final days of the Biden administration.

Truth, it seems, is irrelevant to the Trumpeteers. How sad is that?

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.