Why are some of Trump’s ‘worst’ tweets sent on Jewish holidays?
After the shooting death of Dwyane Wade’s cousin in August, Donald Trump tweeted, “Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”
The previous month, he posted a six-pointed star to Twitter. It superimposed the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” on an image of Hillary Clinton and hundred-dollar bills.
A few weeks before that, the Republican presidential nominee responded to the Orlando nightclub massacre with a tweet saying, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”
These tweets have more in common than just being ill-advised. They also were all blasted into the public discourse on Jewish holidays: Shabbat, Shabbat, and Shavuot, respectively. And they suggest to at least one friend of Trump’s family that when the Republican candidate’s Orthodox Jewish daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are off observing the holy days, Trump loses two of his most important filters.
In her profile of Ivanka Trump published last week in the Huffington Post Highline, Hannah Seligson credits the theory to an anonymous friend of the would-be first daughter and her husband. (Seligson’s list also includes the example of a Shabbat tweet of an image of Donald Trump as a train, a meme tangentially associated with the white supremacist alt-right movement.)
According to Seligson, the friend’s observation was that “some of Donald’s worst tweets of the campaign” came on Jewish holidays, when Ivanka and Jared were off the grid.
“It could be a big problem if the people who make our president not crazy aren’t available one day a week,” the friend told Seligson.
Of course, Trump has sparked outrage on days that have no special Jewish significance. This summer alone, he has said that gun rights supporters could take action if Hillary Clinton is elected; dubbed President Barack Obama the “founder of ISIS”; suggested that the mother of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action was not “allowed” to speak at the Democratic National Convention; called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to hack Clinton’s emails, and accused a “Mexican” federal judge, who was born in Indiana, of being biased by his background.
Amid public outcry, Trump went on to tweet about all these subjects, in some cases repeatedly. (He said he was being “sarcastic” about Putin.) But the controversies didn’t start on Twitter.
If the theory about Jewish holidays is true, then Ivanka Trump and her husband are most effective at reining in Donald Trump before he gets himself into Twitter trouble. Ivanka Trump “is extremely scared of her father, like everyone else,” an anonymous Trump adviser tells Seligson. “She knows you can’t push him. She knows once he goes off on these things, he won’t back down.”
Kushner, the scion of a New Jersey real estate family, also is “deferential” to Donald Trump, according to Seligson.
Trump is a prolific tweeter. According to the New York Times’ politics blog, The Upshot, he has lobbed thousands of insults at more than 250 different targets on the social network during the campaign.
JTA Wire Service
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