As I wrote about yesterday, almost as soon as it was announced that Vice President Kamala Harris had chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, many on the right took to social media to claim this is proof that the Democratic party is anti-Semitic. To be fair, Van Jones also more or less advanced this idea on CNN too:
Van Jones, a CNN political commentator, Tuesday morning cast the choice of Walz as an olive branch to progressives who voted uncommitted. They “needed to have a candidate they could feel comfortable with.” But he added that the party will have to address concerns that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.” [source]
This morning Donald Trump got in on the action during a call with Fox and Friends:
Former President Donald Trump capitalized on Jones’ remarks in an interview with Fox News Wednesday morning. “I have very little doubt” that Harris didn’t pick Shapiro “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else,” he said. [source]
As I mentioned yesterday, this news that the Democratic Party has been captured by anti-Semitism appears to be news to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, current Congressperson and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and many other Jewish leaders within the Democratic Party. For some of their comments and more on the issue, see this article tackling the issue from the liberal Jewish publication The Forward. Additionally, there has been little discussion of what biases prevent Mark Kelly, the other finalist, from being picked.
Rather than relitigate why this claim is absurd (especially when coming from folk who have historically publicly rejected “identity politics” and DEI candidates), I’m writing to share a report from The Bulwark that claims that the Trump campaign is in part responsible for spreading the supposed anti-Semitism in the first place. From the start of Marc Caputo’s article:
AS KAMALA HARRIS BEGAN WINDING DOWN her search for a running mate, Donald Trump’s team knew one thing clearly: It didn’t want her to pick Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of swing-state Pennsylvania whose more moderate record made him a formidable opponent.
So the Trump campaign and its allies moved to quietly kneecap Shapiro. It did so by forging a de facto alliance with the enemy of its enemy, the progressive left, which opposed Shapiro—the only Jewish candidate on Harris’s shortlist—largely because of his pro-Israel stances. The result was a swelling of progressive opposition (some of it organic, some artificially fed) that, among other things, saw Shapiro’s online critics dub him “Genocide Josh.”
“Where we could, we amplified the leftists on Twitter. We fed Shapiro oppo [opposition research] to the media. We did what we could to create more noise and discontent,” a Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal campaign workings, told The Bulwark prior to Harris making her pick on Tuesday.
The article is quick read and well worth reading. Here are some highlights. For example, the Trump advisors interview don’t believe that anti-Semitism was at play in any way:
Trump’s advisers say they believe their whisper campaign against Shapiro almost certainly did not factor into Harris’s decision. Her politics align more with Walz’s, and some reports have suggested that the two had better chemistry than she and Shapiro. But the fact that Republicans had so much anxiety about Shapiro and so little about Walz provides a telling look into how Trump’s campaign sees the state of the race.
There were two key reasons that the Trump Campaign didn’t want Shapiro as a candidate:
FOR MONTHS, TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN has viewed Pennsylvania and its 19 Electoral College votes as the linchpin to winning back the White House. Shapiro’s 15-point win in the 2022 governor’s race loomed large in their psyche. Beyond geography, Trump’s campaign is keenly aware that his loss of white-male voter support alongside slippage in the suburbs in 2020 cost him re-election. Shapiro’s centrist chops (backing school vouchers, tough-on-crime policies, support of Israel) proved effective with both groups.
[…]
Trump World doesn’t believe, as of now, that Walz has more appeal beyond the typical Democratic voting base. After the pick was announced, Republicans began sharing an analysis from MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki who noted that the governor’s win in 2022 was largely due to the “standard Democratic victory model” of running up the score in blue cities and suburbs, not collecting extra votes in rural and small-town Minnesota.
“This is where Dems have lost ground and Walz, in 2022, he didn’t gain any ground,” Kornacki said. “The idea that he’s got this automatic appeal with these small town areas . . . you don’t see it in what he actually did on the ballot.”
I’m a fan of former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s oft-repeated comment that “politics ain’t mumbly peg.” It’s not a game; you shouldn’t expect it to be friendly or fair. Quietly dropping opposition research and helping advance whisper campaigns to damage your opponent is a time-honored political tradition.
I also think it’s fair to point out how cynically the Trump campaign continues to use race, racism, and anti-Semitism as a wedge issue. More importantly, they are trying to drive a wedge not just in the general electorate but within the Democratic party itself. Again, strategically, that makes a lot of sense. It’s also in keeping with a long pattern of Donald Trump seizing on racial issues to try and unify his nearly exclusively White voting base.
Important Postscript:
This article and my previous one are not intended to be a blanket defense of the Democratic party against charges of anti-Semitism. I fully acknowledge that there are, towards the fringes of the Democratic coalition, people who engage in pretty direct anti-Semitism. There are also people within the mainstream who dabble in it as well, consciously or unconsciously, in the context of the crisis in Gaza and the overall state of Palestinians. There is work that needs to be done on that.
And, the lede image is a reminder that this is not unique to a political party. Again, at least some of the “very fine” Trump supporters in Charlottesville began chanting, “You will not replace us!” before also chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” (a phrase historically associated with anti-Semitism). Pro-Trump congresspeople have been dabbling in antisemitism (see Paul Gosar and MTG as examples). More recently former President Trump hosted dinner for Ye (Kanye West) who was well into his anti-Semetic phase, and anti-Semetic White Nationalist Nick Fuentes. And the former President has a history of making middling comments (see the above “Fine People” as an example) decrying anti-Semitism that happened during his administration (perhaps out of a fear of alienating part of his base… after all with Trump, every accusation is a confession). We also learned today that for the first 20 months of his time in office, Vance was coached by Holocaust denier Charles C. Johnson (technically, Johnson is not a complete anti-Semite in so much as he supports Isreal as a model “ethno-nation).
So, in this case, this particular problem is an example of something that manifests itself on “both sides” though in different ways.
