Just when you thought the media were finally fed up with the banality of Donald Trump’s absurdist shtick, he ups the ante. As you were enjoying Thanksgiving with your family last week, the former president was dining with two notorious antisemites, deranged rapper Kanye West, now known as “Ye,” and Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Embroiled in a scandal yet again, Trump is back where he wants to be: dominating all the headlines in the mainstream press and sucking up all the oxygen in the room of American politics.
Trump claims he didn’t know who Fuentes was, which may be true given his history of lack of attention to detail, but this is still no excuse. Someone in his inner circle must’ve been familiar with this “beer hall putsch wannabe punk.” Any other politician’s career would be over after such a reprehensible meeting. But not Teflon Don. He’s still a force to be reckoned with in the GOP.
As for Ye, it looks like he’s running for president too. The hip-hop artist says he asked Trump to be his running mate, and Fuentes may have access to his Twitter account with over 32 million followers. Fuentes is using the platform to pick fights with top prospective 2024 contender Ron DeSantis and prominent Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro. Will our national nightmare with celebrity forays into politics ever end?
Luckily, one bright spot may have emerged out of all this mishegoss. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a Jewish pro-Israel organization that has remained enthusiastically supportive of Trump through thick and thin, appears to have drawn a line. The group, which recently awarded 45 with the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion in recognition of his support for Israel while he was president, denounced him for his “friendly dinner with such vile antisemites.” In a statement, ZOA president Morton Klein said Trump’s “dining with Jew-haters helps legitimize and mainstream antisemitism and must be condemned by everyone.”
This is a welcome sign. Far too often, we’ve seen self-professed believers put their politics before their faith. This trend is worrisome not only in the way it inverts temporal and sacred. It’s one of the primary drivers of the decline of religion in the West. When religion and politics become superfluous, politics always wins out because why bother performing traditional rituals if you can fulfill your religious obligation by demonstrating ideological purity and prostrating yourself before political iconography? The ZOA’s steadfast refusal to sacrifice its religious identity at the altar of politics here is refreshing and worthy of commendation.