Kimberly Guilfoyle invokes ‘cosmopolitan elites’ in RNC speech
Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump, Jr. Image by Getty Images
By Helen Chernikoff August 25, 2020
Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign executive and the girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr., used the phrase “cosmopolitan elites” — which invokes an anti-Semitic dogwhistle — in her speech during the Republican National Convention on Monday night.
. @kimguilfoyle invokes “cosmopolitan elites” in her #RNC speech. “Do you support the cancel culture, the cosmopolitan elites of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden who blame America first?” pic.twitter.com/VNzuuzfqWU
— Johnny Kunza (@johnkunza) August 25, 2020
In its most anti-Semitic usage, the word “cosmopolitan” appears as a noun paired with the adjective “rootless,” wrote Forward columnist Aviya Kushner in a 2017 piece on the term, after Trump official Stephen Miller used it to criticize bias in the media.
According to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Kushner wrote, “anticosmopolitan campaign” was a “euphemism for the victimization of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late Stalin years.”
Guilfoyle was making an argument that Democrats wanted to control the average person — “how they think and how they live.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
