"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
From the Civil War to Donald Trump, anti-Jewish sentiment and American elections have gone together
As the 2024 United States presidential election hurtles toward its conclusion, Donald Trump has brought the question of antisemitism back to the center of the campaign. With his history of courting Jewish voters while simultaneously insulting them, the former President has now been revealed as fixated with the dictator who directed the Holocaust, Adolf Hilter - by his former White House chief of staff. Retired Marine General John Kelly in interviews published in The Atlantic and The New York Times said that Trump had commented more than once: “‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too”. He also said he needed “German generals” like Hitler’s generals. Kelly says Trump fits the definition of a fascist and has expressed repeated admiration for a wide variety of authoritarians and dictators both historical and contemporary.
Except the Republican nominee claims that any Jewish American who doesn’t vote for him “should have their head examined”, while claiming that if he loses, it will be their fault. Trump has proclaimed himself a great friend to American Jews and to Israel while calling out what he sees as antisemitism on the left connected to student protests in 2023 and 2024.
Jewish voters are an extremely small bloc of the US electorate, and have favored the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1920. Trump himself has consistently denied that he is antisemitic and vowed to remove “Jew-haters” from government, while simultaneously using antisemitic stereotypes about money and financial acumen. He has also gained support from outwardly anti-Jewish far-right groups, and mused at length about genetic purity while endorsing Christian nationalist concepts. Essentially, Trump’s feelings about Jews are complicated, and inseparable from past tropes and misconceptions.
But in a race that has consistently been extremely close, it makes sense for Trump to court every group of voters he can in hopes of moving small numbers of persuadable voters to his side. That Trump is attempting to reach out to Jews while simultaneously using antisemitic tropes to castigate them is only the latest permutation in how anti-Jewish sentiment and US presidential elections have gone together. Some candidates have run on openly antisemitic platforms – usually with little success. Others have tamped down their antisemitism or even kept it hidden until it emerged later.
Most early links between antisemitism and presidential elections have revolved around the idea that a small cadre of powerful Jews controls the financial industry, and uses their power to get the candidate of their choice elected. The family that eclipsed all others was the Rothschilds (no relation to the author of this piece), whose largesse in Europe had become so legendary that it spawned a vast industry of myths and stories about what they could do with their money.
While the Rothschilds were immensely powerful in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, that power never made its way to the United States, as family members felt confounded by how federal and state laws worked, and the country’s deep suspicion of central banking. Nonetheless, it was a Rothschild agent, the German Jew August Belmont, who bore the brunt of antisemitic suspicion during the 1864 election for his supposed influence over Democratic candidate General George McClellan, running against incumbent Abraham Lincoln.
Arriving in New York in 1837, Belmont quickly became a fixture in both Wall Street and the Democratic Party. During the Civil War, Belmont kept the Rothschilds in Europe apprised of the course of the war, sharing his belief that the Confederacy could not win, while advocating for a settlement that brought the country back together. Union papers and political pamphleteers didn’t see it that way, claiming that the Rothschilds were selling bonds to the Confederacy, and that the Democrats sought a leader “in the agent of foreign Jew bankers.” Op-eds published just before the 1864 election singled out Belmont as the “owner” of McClellan, with Belmont himself “owned” by the Rothschilds—who in turn owned incalculable Confederate debt. None of this was true, and had little effect on the outcome of the election, which Lincoln easily won.
Just one election later, the perceived antisemitism of legendary Union general Ulysses S. Grant would become campaign fodder as Democrats played up Grant’s issuing of the antisemitic General Order 11 in December 1862. The military order expelled Jews from some formerly Confederate areas in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky due to them “violating every regulation of trade” that the US government handed down. Hundreds of Jews with no ties to the Confederacy were forced from their homes, and the order was countermanded by President Lincoln several weeks later.
Likely spurred on by August Belmont, Grant’s Democratic opponents painted him as deeply antisemitic, printed newspaper stories exaggerating the effects of the expulsion order, and urged Jews not to vote for him. Grant responded with a letter claiming he had issued the order without reading it, that he regretted it, and it was sent not out of prejudice but to stop the illicit black-market sale of Southern cotton by Jewish traders. Grant would later become close friends with several prominent Jewish banking families, and easily won the Jewish vote in his victorious 1868 campaign.
In the decades after the Civil War, the United States would become entangled in another internal conflict, one less bloody but almost as hostile. The “free silver” debate pitted supposed elite advocates of the gold standard against populist Democratic-leaning “silverites,” who sought to mint coinage with a fixed value. The debate drove multiple presidential elections, with the most prominent free silver advocate being Illinois Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who won his party’s nomination three times, losing each election. Byran gained almost god-like status among free silver advocates for his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.
In the speech, Bryan railed against foreign bankers, many of whom were Jewish and had made a fortune in the gold market, hoarding wealth at the expense of the American working man – leading to what some witnesses claimed were shouts of “Down with the hooked-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street! Down with the Christ-killing gold bugs!” Other historians have disputed that the populist movement was this overtly anti-Jewish, or that anyone shouted this during the Cross of Gold speech. Bryan had also specifically railed about US financial policy being “administered on behalf of the American people and not on behalf of the Rothschilds and other foreign bankers” in a speech to Congress that year.
The free silver debate engulfed the US for well over a decade, but it didn’t translate into electoral success – Bryan lost the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. And while Bryan was a devout Christian, he was never explicitly antisemitic.
The same could hardly be said of another, even less successful presidential candidate, car magnate Henry Ford.
Ford’s presidential aspirations were brief, and not especially aspirational. On the strength of both his wealth as president of the Ford Motor Company and his activism against American involvement in what was then called the Great War, Ford won the 1916 Republican Party primary in Michigan without campaigning. However, he had no interest in running or winning the nomination, and never got closer than 10th place in the party’s final delegate count. Just two years later, President Woodrow Wilson drafted the still-reluctant Ford to run for the Senate in Michigan. He reluctantly did, and ran in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, winning the former. The race was beset by allegations of fraud and overspending by his opponent, and Ford narrowly lost. In 1924, Ford was again mooted as a presidential candidate, but he showed no interest.
By then, Ford was well on his way to a different type of fame than as an industrialist or politician – as one of the most famous and virulent antisemites of the pre-World War II era. Ford’s publication of a slightly laundered version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent made him the subject of a boycott from America’s Jewish community, and he had received vocal praise from Nazi Party head Adolf Hitler, who saw him as “the leader of the fascist movement in America.” Even Ford’s anti-war activism was rooted in antisemitism, as he saw international Jewish bankers and their lust for profit as the cause of the war roiling Europe. President Wilson later rebuked Ford’s antisemitism, and he shut down the Dearborn Independent in 1927, apologizing for his actions – though never entirely renouncing Nazi Germany or recanting his beliefs.
Another national hero sympathetic to the Nazi cause who would flirt with presidential aspirations was aviator Charles Lindbergh. The famed flier openly spouted antisemitic tropes about Jewish bankers “agitating” for war with the Nazis, while claiming Jewish immigration was diluting the generic purity of Americans. He was a major player in the fascist-sympathizing America First movement, which advocated for the US to stay out of what many of its members believed was another Jewish war in Europe. And he made frequent trips to Nazi Germany, one of which saw him received a medal from Luftwaffe head and war criminal Herman Goering – a medal Lindbergh never returned. But while some anti-war advocates wanted Lindbergh to run a peace campaign against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, there was little chance that an open supporter of the Nazis would win, and Lindbergh never formally was a candidate.
After the Second World War, American rage and paranoia were focused far more on anti-communist than anti-Jewish efforts, though many prominent figures mistakenly linked the two together. Most American politicians were able to keep whatever antisemitism they might have harbored to themselves, but it sometimes emerged in ugly ways. In the early 1970’s, an increasingly embattled Richard Nixon privately vented to aides about many of his enemies in the Democratic Party and media being Jewish. He raged against editors he knew to be Jews, assailed the religion of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, and complained of Jewish infiltration in what he believed was a communist plot against him. Nixon’s attacks on Jews both inside and outside his administration only became public in the late 1990’s with the release of the entire library of tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office, and he always denied being antisemitic.
Finally, there were the failed runs of Louisiana state representative and notorious KKK figure David Duke. A perennial candidate for multiple offices, Duke ran in 1980 and 1988 as a Democrat and as a Republican in 1992, parlaying his obvious and vocal belief in Holocaust denial and “Jewish supremacy” into a campaign designed to gain votes by whipping up conspiracist fantasies about Jewish control of government. None of these candidacies had much success, with his only real accomplishment being winning New Hampshire’s 1988 vice-presidential primary on accident, believing it have delegates he would carry into the party convention.
Despite hanging up his own presidential aspirations, Duke continued to involve himself in politics, endorsing Donald Trump in 2016 by claiming he was “100 percent behind” the mogul’s campaign.
But while antisemitism is consistent, antisemites themselves are fickle. Duke eventually abandoned Trump, and recently endorsed third party candidate Jill Stein for the 2024 election – despite Stein being Jewish.
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