Trump Appoints Aide With Anti-Semitic Ties
On Monday, Donald Trump appointed a top foreign policy advisor whose father was an active member of the John Birch Society, which has a history of segregationist and racist views.
Trump named Joe Schmitz, a former inspector general in the Defense Department, his top foreign policy advisor.
Joe Schmitz’ father, John Schmitz, won election as a California State Senator and ran for president in 1972 as a candidate for the Independent Party.
The elder Schmitz, who was staunchly against abortion, was stripped of a Senate position after writing that while he chaired a hearing about abortion in California, he looked out on “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces,” according to a 1982 New York Times article.
When he died in 2001, a publication of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial organization, published an appreciative obituary and called him a “good friend of the institute.”
The John Birch Society opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Today, the society denies these allegations and claims anyone with these beliefs would be expelled.
The Trump campaign could not be immediately reached for comment.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO