The Bonds that Bind Us

There has been a lot in the news about the stock market fluctuations reacting to Trump’s tariffs. But political writers believe it was the large sell-off of bonds that finally persuaded Trump to hold off on the tariffs.

Treasury bonds are how governments borrow money to cover budget deficits. Bonds are considered the safest low-risk investments but with correspondingly low interest fixed rates. President Trump’s on-off announcements about tariffs, and the resulting economic chaos and fear of a recession, have shaken public confidence in the American government and economy, causing bond interest rates to increase. Because the increased risk of not getting paid interest, or not getting their money back, purchasers of bonds are now paying less for them and demanding a higher rate of interest. The increase may seem small, moving from about 4% to 4.5% in the last week (on 10 year bonds), but on trillions of debt it adds up.

As bond interest rises it pushes up the interest rates on mortgages and other loans. It also increases the portion of the budget dedicated to servicing the debt, reducing the amount left for essential services.

A key feature of the budget that just passed the House is the big tax cut that Trump has promised all his billionaire campaign donors. That tax cut will add 4 or 5 trillion dollars to the debt over the next few years which will require selling that many more bonds. Trump has painted himself into a corner here. He campaigned on the big tax cut then created a situation where it will be nigh impossible to finance it.

Thom Hartmann reports that $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion US federal debt is owned by foreign countries: Canada $350b, Japan $1t, EU $1.5-2t, and China $760b. If these countries were to sell off their shares flooding the market, it would make it that much harder to find buyers for new bonds.

At the same time as bonds and stocks are selling off, the American dollar is declining in value compared with the currencies of its major trading partners. It dropped 0.9 percent in the last week.

Unlike President Trump, Canada’s current Prime Minister Mark Carney understands international finance – he was the Governor of the Bank of Canada and later of the Bank of England – the equivalent of the American Federal Reserve Board. And unlike Trump, the leaders of the other countries, if they don’t understand international finance, will listen to people who do.

Matt Eagan, a portfolio manager with Loomis, Sayles & Company interviewed for the NYT, put it succinctly: “Picking fights with major trading partners who also finance your debt becomes especially risky with a wide fiscal deficit and no credible plan to rein it in.”

Sources

https://hartmannreport.com/p/saturday-report-41225

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/11/what-are-bonds-and-why-have-they-spooked-donald-trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/economy/treasury-bonds-tariffs.html

A New Low

Yesterday I ended by saying the Trump regime is at a new level (in firing Erez Reuveni for admitting the deportation of Abrego Garcia was in error) and likely to go even lower. It just did.

In his April 10 substack post Thom Hartmann wrote:

The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn’t just the right to vote or protest — it’s the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others.

And it’s the one Donald Trump tried to crush yesterday…

After the November 2024 election there was speculation that Trump would exact vengeance on his political enemies with frivolous criminal charges. That is why President Biden made all those preemptive pardons. But he hadn’t done so – until Wednesday. Trump used other weapons at his disposal: revoking Secret Service protection and/or security clearance for his political rivals; cutting off lawyers and law firms from security clearance and access to federal buildings; withholding federal grants to universities; detaining and deporting student protestors.

On Wednesday April 9 President Trump signed an executive order directing the DOJ to investigate two civil servants from his first administration – Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs – whose only crime was telling the truth.

Miles Taylor served as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. In 2028 while in office, Taylor wrote an anonymous op-ed for the NYT criticizing the Trump administration. In the October 2020 interview when Taylor revealed himself as the author, he said that “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. The country cannot rely on well-intentioned, unelected bureaucrats around the President to steer him towards what’s right. He has purged most of them anyway.” I would add that this time Trump has purged them all.

In 2029 Taylor published a book, anonymously, called “A Warning” with more details of the workings inside the first Trump administration.

On Wednesday Trump called Taylor a traitor who “wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies.”

In response to the executive order Taylor posted on X “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous.  America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

Chris Krebs was the top cybersecurity official responsible for elections security. After Joe Biden’s win in 2020 Krebs pushed back on the allegations of election fraud. He said “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” For disagreeing with the MAGA position on election fraud, Krebs was fired by Trump. Later, as a witness for the January 6 Select Committee, he said “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former President, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.”

As he was signing the executive order Trump repeated his lies about the “rigged” 2020 election and called Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.”

The authors of an article in Politico put the situation very mildly in writing:

A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Under that norm of separation, criminal investigations are supposed to be insulated from political pressure, but Trump has repeatedly scorned the notion of DOJ independence. Making Wednesday’s action even more remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.

There are two issues here. One is the frivolous charges against two men for doing their job and telling the truth. The more significant issue is the influence of the Executive Branch on the Department of Justice. During Trump 1.0 he communicated almost daily with his AG Bill Barr, pressuring him to go after certain people or to speed up the process. In contrast Biden to my knowledge had no influence on Merrick Garland after his appointment as AG. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President in the 2024 election Garland removed himself one step farther from Biden by appointing a special counsel, Jack Smith, to investigate Trump’s cases. Now Trump is not just pressuring the DOJ he is issuing an executive order demanding their investigation. Yet Trump and his followers still rave about Biden’s weaponization of the Justice Department against him and swears that he would never do such a thing.

At her Senate confirmation hearing for Attorney General, Pam Bondi said

“Politics have got to be taken out of the system. This Department has been weaponized for years and years and years. And it has to stop… So will everyone be held to an equal, fair system of justice if I am the next Attorney General? Absolutely. And no one is above the law.”

[If you follow the link below to this story you will note that this page is from the Trump regime website and is titled “Following the Facts: Bondi Dispels Democrat Myths During Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing”. You would never find such blatant partisanship in the government website under Biden or any previous president.]

We will find out soon if Bondi is true to her words or if this is just another example of Republican hypocrisy.

Sources:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-this-the-moment-american-democracy-345

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/09/donald-trump-retribution-miles-taylor-00007512

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/miles-taylor-anonymous-trump.html

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/following-the-facts-bondi-dispels-democrat-myths-at-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing

Due Process

There has been much discussion on the April 7 Supreme Court’s 5:4 ruling on the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members. Most condemned the court for allowing the deportations to continue while the legality of this application of the Alien Enemies act is being debated in the courts.

Others pointed out that the most significant part of the ruling, which was unanimous at 9:0, was the insistence that due process was required before deportation which includes notice that they are subject to deportation and a reasonable time to seek habeas corpus (challenging their confinement in court).

In Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent she stated that if you [the Trump administration] deport a single individual without due process after today, you are violating an order of the Supreme Court of the United States.

This decision upheld the ruling by the fourth Circuit of Appeals which said in part:

“The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable,”

Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord discussed this in an article for MSNBC called “Cruelty Matched with Lawlessness”. Weissmann and Jen Rubin also talked about it for the Contrarian on April 9.

Weissmann quoted a Home Security spokesman who tried to steer the conversation away from the illegalities to the end result – getting a bad person off the streets to make America safer.

“Thanks to President Trump, foreign terrorist organizations no longer have legal protections in America. Mr. Garcia was a leader in MS-13, a brutal gang that rapes, murders, and maims for sport. Credible evidence links him to human trafficking.  … And then, instead of acknowledging the hard work of our law enforcement in making America safe again, the mainstream media is trying to turn a violent gang member … into a … victim. This isn’t a misunderstood soul. This is a ruthless criminal who terrorizes communities. The truth is simple, he’s off our streets. That’s the story. “

Weissmann comments: 

The idea that it’s like he’s off our street because he’s a bad person, is irrelevant to the legal principle of due process. They didn’t present any proof of the allegations. But it’s just so shocking to me that of all people, you’d think somebody who had been a criminal defendant would understand that.  You don’t … say … Well, Donald Trump committed crimes in four jurisdictions, so let’s just send him off to jail. This is like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with her head”, trial to follow. 

Due process is especially critical when, as the government is claiming, they have no jurisdiction to recall them once they are deported. Even when they’re conceding that it was a mistake. 

Mary McCord quoted from an amicus brief filed by Erwin Chemerinsky, Larry Tribe and Martha Minow:

The government’s argument is that “once the executive branch has removed an individual from the United States and arranged for that individual to be held in a foreign prison, an Article III court is constitutionally disempowered from ordering that the individual be returned to the United States, regardless of whether the executive branch’s removal of the individual lacked any statutory basis and failed to afford the individual any due process, and flouted a court order issued pursuant to a congressional statute barring removal.” 

They went on to say, “If the government’s argument were correct, the executive branch would possess a shuddering degree “of power, power that the president could wield in extreme and extraordinary ways, including against American citizens that the president simply disfavors. … and that should frighten everyone.” 

Finally, Weissmann and McCord discussed the attorney who was fired for being honest and doing his job. Erez Reuveni was “put on administrative leave” by the DOJ after admitting that the Trump administration had mistakenly deported a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been protected from removal since 2019.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, backed by AG Pam Bondi, suspended Reuveni for not “vigorously advocating” on behalf of Homeland Security.

Judge Thacker of the Fourth Circuit responded that “the duty of zealous representation is tempered by the duty of candor to the court, among other ethical obligations, and the duty to uphold the rule of law, particularly on the part of a government attorney.”

McCord: I mean, retaliation against someone who is doing what they are obligated as an attorney to do, which is tell the truth to the court, is just, you know, we’re at a new level here, right? We’ve seen retaliation for lots of things, but we’re at a new level here.  

Yes we’re at a new level. And it’s likely to go even lower before turning around.

Sources:

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/andrew-weissmann-and-jen-rubin-on-7a3

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/prosecuting-donald-trump/main-justice-cruelty-matched-lawlessness-rcna200490

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5235778-doj-suspends-lawyer-deportation-case/

Tariffs and Manufacturing in America

Two of my favorite daily news writers covered the same theme this morning – that Trump’s tariffs will not bring back manufacturing jobs to America. They both wrote before Trump’s announcement, late this morning, that he was pausing most of the tariffs for 90 days, causing the stock market to rebound dramatically.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote that MAGA supporters had started to talk about tariffs as a way to Make America Masculine Again [my phrase, not hers – the acronym MAMA won’t cut it as a manly meme]. She quoted Rotimi Adeoye writing that the MAGA identity fetishes “rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity”. Richardson adds

“That image – and the tradwife image that complements it – recalls an imagined American past. In reality, the 1960s manufacturing economy MAGA influencer appear to be celebrating depended on high rates of unionization and taxation, and on government investing heavily in infrastructure, including healthcare and education.”

Thom Hartmann starts his post by describing the Trump story on how free trade destroyed the comfortable middle class where “a single worker in an American factory could buy a house, take a nice vacation every year, get a new car every two or three year, put his kids through college, and retire with a comfortable pension.” Then free trade stole 90,000 factories and 40 million good manufacturing jobs. “To get back to that prosperity, all we need to do is to use tariffs to force manufacturing back to the U.S.”

But, Hartmann points out, the factories didn’t create the middle class, the unions did. Without unions, factories only created brutal working conditions and low wages (and wealthy owners).

Hartmann argues that it was a coincidence that the loss of manufacturing to other countries and the collapse of unions happened at about the same time in the early 80s. Both were caused by free trade and Neoliberalism which started with Reagan and continued under every president – including Clinton and Obama – until Joe Biden.

Trump and the Republican Party are just as opposed to unions now as Reagan was so all the tariffs in the world are not going to return the American middle class to pre-Reagan levels. Hartmann summarizes it this way:

The simple reality is that bringing manufacturing back to America without accompanying it with intense unionization won’t raise wages at all. It’s why Honda workers in Alabama and Indiana make less than do unionized MacDonalds [sic] workers do in Denmark (who also get six weeks of annual paid vacation, free healthcare, and free college).

This is in addition to the fact that the way Trump is handling tariffs is unlikely to bring back any manufacturing to America in any case. Trump applies tariffs to all countries instead of targeting those that compete with American manufacturing with low wages.

And Trump’s volatile on-off approach to tariffs based on a whim indicate a lack of a long term plan (or a plan of any kind). It takes a lot of money and time to build a factory and no corporation will undertake such a project based on today’s tariffs which may not be in place 5 or ten years from now (or, as we have just seen, 5 or 10 hours). Wise investors will do nothing (except temporarily shut down current operations in America) as long as Trump is in the White House.

Senator Bernie Sanders made those points in a news release today:

… I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just large corporations. Targeted tariffs can be a powerful tool to stop corporations from outsourcing American jobs. They can help level the playing field for American autoworkers or steelworkers to compete fairly against companies who have moved production to countries where they can pay starvation wages. 

But Trump’s chaotic across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it. 

Imposing steep tariffs on countries like Germany or France will not bring jobs back to America. These are not low-wage countries. Corporations are not shutting down plants in America and moving them to Switzerland. Trump’s blanket tariffs will just raise prices for American consumers and hurt our relationships with allies, undermining our global position. 

Trump’s trade chaos – changing policy from day to day – is rapidly undermining our economy and making it impossible for households and small businesses to function. How can you plan for next week, let alone next year, when the rules might change tomorrow?

… Enough is enough. We need a coherent trade policy that puts working people first. 

 

Sources:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-8-2025

https://hartmannreport.com/p/trumps-factory-fantasy-the-middle-71f

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-statement-on-trump-tariff-announcement/

Supreme Court Decision on Deportations

In a close 5:4 decision (Amy Coney Barrett voted with the other three women justices) the US Supreme Court ruled Monday to vacate (overturn) a Judge’s temporary restraining order on deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

This was an emergency case, part of a shadow docket, where a question requires an immediate response with no time for careful deliberations.

What it means is that for now the Trump regime can continue to use the Alien Enemies act to deport alleged gang members to Venezuela. 

The same day Chief Justice Roberts, on his own, temporarily blocked the order made last Friday by Judge Xinix to have Kilmar Abrego Garcia – who the Trump administration admits was deported in error –  returned by midnight. The block is by an "administrative stay" meant to give the court time to consider the case.

The court did not address if the Act is being used properly – that question, they wrote, will have to be decided in a Texas court.

The Supreme Court ruling did place limits on the use of the Act, specifically that notice and due process is required before deportation. All nine justices agreed that detainees “must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time ad in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.

While the court’s insistence on notice and due process is welcome, there is little assurance that the Trump regime will follow this part of the ruling. They will just see it as a justification that what they did and are doing is just fine. This was Trump’s response

“The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA.”

It should go without saying that the President, whoever that may be, could still secure America’s borders while following the law and ensuring that the people they are deporting are in fact criminals.

The Supreme Court should have halted all deportations until the question of the use of the Alien Enemies Act had been established, especially when the Trump administration admits that once deported they have no way to bring anyone back for trial. Furthermore it should have insisted on bringing back all of the deported for trial, not just the one man that the administration admitted was in error. By the way the lawyer who made that admission has been fired. It appears four of the justices agree with my position.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson each wrote a dissent. Here are some excerpts from Sotomayor:

“The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”

“The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”

Jackson also lamented the Court’s hasty decision.

“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison. For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning. Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and law warrants considerable thought and attention from the judiciary. That was why the District Court issued a temporary restraining order to prevent immediate harm to the targeted individuals while the court considered the lawfulness of the Government’s conduct. But this court now sees fit to intervene, hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that,  one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.

We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

Update April 9

Guardian article discusses ruling as a win for Trump and for immigrants

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/supreme-court-trump-deportations

Sources

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/an-extraordinary-threat-to-the-rule-of-law-justice-sotomayor-excoriates-inexplicable-decision-to-side-with-trump-admin-in-high-profile-deportation-case/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/us-supreme-court-deportations

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-venezuelan-deportations.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/supreme-court-wrongly-deported.html

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/today-on-the-shadow-docket-assisting-trumps-arbitrary-deportations-to-slave-prisons

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-asks-scotus-block-order-return-man-mistakenly-dep-rcna199979

Coming Recession

Robert Reich in his substack post this morning predicts a coming recession and speculates that the Trump regime is purposefully planning it.

Economists at JP Morgan peg the chances of a recession at 60%. It's been growing slowly over the last few weeks and is now more likely than not.

What is behind the risk of recession is, of course, the Trump tariffs which impose a tax on imported goods. Consumers end up paying more for almost everything they buy, even if it is made in America.

President Trump is pushing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates to encourage spending, thus slowing or averting a recession. Powell won't do this because lowering interest rates will fuel inflation. He can't fight both inflation and a recesssion at the same time.

The main goal of the Federal Reserve is to control inflation. Last week Powell said "Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well-anchored and to make certain that a one-time increasae in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem."

The Federal Reserve Board is set up as an independent body tasked with setting the "federal funds"interest rate which banks charge to each other. The Fed" as it's called for short is supposed to be an independent body; Trump has no business publicly (or privately) trying to influence the Board's decision on interest rate. It's designed that way for the good reason to keep politics out of the decision making. Trump is of course calling Powell's decision "PLAYING POLITICS".

So if interest rates remain steady and inflation continues to rise, a recession is likely.

Recessions are great opportunities for those with money to make even more. People with limited income are forced to sell shares or companies for whatever they can get for them to pay the rent and buy food. Those with money can buy them up at bargain basement prices and increase their wealth when the economy picks up again. A recession also gives a government an excuse to cut wages, government services, and environmental standards, all of which compound the problems of lower income people.

A recession early in Trump's first year is also politically beneficial. Trump is hoping that people will forget about it by the time the next election rolls around. Here is the formula: cause a crisis, blame your opponents, fix it, claim the credit.

But I'm not confident that this recession will turn around by 2028, and probably not by the 2026 midterm elections. Major recessions can take 5-10 years to recover.

Source

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-trump-and-his-billionaires-welcome

Antisemitism – the IHRA Definition

Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, writing in the Guardian March 23, 2025, argue that the new definition of antisemitism is being used to promote Christian Nationalism and that rather than protect Jews it actually endangers them.

The article clearly explains the two positions on antisemitism:

Following the horrendous Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, and the subsequent war and utter destruction of Gaza, two sharply contrasting positions have emerged.

On the one hand, many Jewish organizations and advocates have seen the emerging pro-Palestinian protest movement as a manifestation of antisemitism, a classic example of the over-scrutinization of Israel, and the denial of Israel’s right to defend itself.

On the other hand, many critics of Israel and of Zionism argue against this conflation and in favor of their right to support the Palestinian struggle. For them, labeling anti-Israel positions as antisemitic is a way to silence dissenting opinions and to prevent an honest discussion of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published a working definition of antisemitism wich has been adopted by 46 countries including Canada and the United States. The core definition is straightforward:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Attached to the definition is a list of examples of antisemitism (see the link below). Here are a few of the examples:

·        Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel

·        Manifestations might include the targeting the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

·        Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected of demanded of any other democratic nation.

·        Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

I have no problem with the definition or the examples given. It’s the interpretations of some that I question.

I have argued previously (Feb 6 post “Gaza”) that neither Jews or Palestinians living around the world should be blamed for what is happening in Gaza. Any targeting of them is misguided and wrong.

The “targeting of the state of Israel” is a tricky issue. What criticism is considered “similar to that … against any other country”? Russia is certainly being criticized for bombing Ukraine – can Israel be criticized for bombing Gaza? Israel can argue that Hamas started the Gaza war while Russia’s similar claims about Ukraine are laughably false. Does that make a difference?

I also agree with the example of double standards. Is Israel really being held to a higher standard than other democracies?

Is it a double standard to expect Israel to follow the Geneva Conventions of warfare when Hamas (and Russia) do not? When other countries commit war crimes they are condemned; when Israel commits war crimes it is condemned. Where is the double standard here?

Is it a double standard to expect Israel to give up land they won in the 1967 war when Russia was allowed to keep Crimea? Again, Israel can claim that the Arab nations started that war while Russia can make no such claim. Does that make a difference? The reason Russia is being “allowed” to keep Crimea is that no country is willing to risk nuclear war to kick them out, not because everyone thinks they won it “fair and square”.

Is the reporting of the Gaza war an example of a double standard? Why does the media focus on the Palestinian casualties and not on Israelis? Well maybe because there haven’t been 60,000 Israelis killed in the last year and a half, and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv haven’t been bombed to rubble. If they had been I have no doubts that the media would have covered it, likely in much more detail than that of Gaza.

The Hamas attack of October 7 was well covered by the media. Israel had the world’s sympathy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even got a hug from President Joe Biden. But Israel squandered all that sympathy and good will after only a few days with its brutal retaliation.

The example of the right to self determination is another complex issue. Can this be interpreted to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemetic? There are Jews worldwide who don’t support the existence of the state of Israel. Does that make them antisemites? Shouldn’t they be allowed their own opinion?

I can agree that denying the state of Israel the right to exist is antisemitism. The extremist Palestinian view that the Israelis should be removed and the land “from the river to the sea” be returned to them, is wrong. But equally wrong is the extremist Israeli view that Israel should annex both Gaza and the West Bank. Their motto is also “from the river to the sea.”

The real problem though with this issue is that it is used as an excuse to stifle debate on Israeli policies, including the Gaza war. Any criticism of Israel’s destruction of Gaza is immediately labeled as antisemitism.

Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, accuses President Trump of exploiting the fight against antisemitism as a ruse to control universities. Nadler said “Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism”.

Nadler warned that restricting free speech on campuses would harm Jews as well. “Whenever freedom is curtailed, Jews in particular become victims”. He also said that ironically Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism would make American Jews less safe. “There are always antisemites looking for an excuse to react, so this is dangerous and it certainly does not help at all”.

Nadler added that if Trump was really interested in fighting antisemitism he would fire numerous antisemites that have been appointed to high government positions, naming Kingsley Wilson as an example. Nadler also pointed out the firing of senior investigators in the Education Department’s Civil Rights office, who could have helped deal with anti-Jewish hate on campuses.

I would add to this list that if Trump was serious about fighting anti-semitism he should condemn the use of Nazi symbols and speech among his followers. He won’t of course because he needs his Nazi followers as much as he needs the Evangelical Christians.

Kenneth Stern, writing for the Guardian back in December 2019 deplored the use of the IHRA definition, of which he was the lead drafter, to stifle speech on American campuses. Trump, in his first term, had just signed an Executive Order adopting the definition in interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Stern wrote:

It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestine advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.

Back then Stern said he was “worried that administrators will now have a strong motivation to suppress, or at least condemn, political speech for fear of litigation.” That fear was more than justified. Trump is now using threats of funding cuts to force universities to his will. He is also kidnapping students for pro-Palestinian speech and detaining or deporting them with no due process.

For Trump, antisemitism is just another tool to further his thirst for power.

Update April 7

A similar article appeared in the NYT today by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-jewish-antisemitism-wesleyan.html

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect

https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAntisemitism%20is%20a%20certain%20perception,community%20institutions%20and%20religious%20facilities.%E2%80%9D

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/23/antisemitism-redefinition-jewish-safety-christian-nationalism-democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/jerry-nadler-trump-antisemitism

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect