Donald Trump departs the courtroom after being found guilty on all 34 counts in his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30, 2024. Photo by Getty Images

Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson May 30, 2024

Now that Donald Trump is a convicted felon, many American Jews face a difficult moral choice. Is support for Israel’s right-wing government more important than the rule of law and American democracy as we know it? Are there any red lines left?

These are not idle questions. Miriam Adelson, according to a report in Politico, is set to fund a Super PAC supporting Trump’s election bid to the tune of over $90 million. As the eighth-richest woman in the world, Adelson has the power to shift the presidential race singlehandedly. (To be clear, SuperPACs should not exist, donations of this size should be illegal, money is not speech, and the appalling wealth gap enabled by the GOP’s welfare-for-the-ultra-rich policies is a moral stain on our society. But moving on.) And in addition to continued tax breaks for her and her businesses, we know from Adelson’s statements that Israel is atop her list of policy expectations.

So, quite a lot hangs in this particular balance. According to Project 2025, the plan for Trump’s presidency drafted by the Heritage Foundation and embraced by many in Trump’s orbit, the second Trump administration would involve mass deportations and concentration camps, weaponizing the Justice Department to go after political opponents, reversing all of Biden’s actions on climate change, and strengthening executive power to its greatest level in all of American history. It is an embrace of authoritarianism in the service of American ultra-nationalism.

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And the man set to execute this plan is a convicted felon who continues, to this day, to lie to the American people about what he did and to undermine the due process of law which found him guilty of doing it. Never in American history has a man with so much power sown so much distrust of fundamental American institutions. A third of the country is in his thrall. We’re ready for civil war, they say, over and over again. And they have the guns.

Jewish supporters of Trump are a little different. Some are in the MAGA camp, but many more have a more transactional relationship with the former president. They hold their noses at the scandals, the dinners with neo-Nazis, and the antisemitic conspiracy theories, so long as Trump delivers for Israel. Or, more specifically, Israel’s interests as understood by the American and Israeli Right: unconditional military and financial aid, support for the settlement project and the vision of ‘Greater Israel,’ and, now, absolute deference to the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.

But what now?

The predominant right-wing response to Trump’s conviction has been predictable: denial. As I’ve written about in several contexts lately, there are at least two kinds of denial in cases like this: dishonest denial and actual, psychological denial. I wonder which is more prevalent now. Do Trump’s defenders know in their hearts that he did it — that he cheated on his wife, had sex with the adult film star, paid her off so Americans wouldn’t find out about it during the 2016 election, and then lied about the payoffs in his business records — but still defend him because Israel comes first?

Or are they actually in denial themselves? Have they gone so far down the road with this transparently obvious con artist that the cognitive dissonance of accepting the truth about Trump’s misdeeds is so great that they’ll believe any preposterous story that avoids it?

This is what the concept of cognitive dissonance is all about. Rather than accept that the Bible isn’t literally true, fundamentalists believe that God buried the dinosaur bones to test our faith. Rather than accept that Americans voted Donald Trump out of office, MAGA devotees insist that the 2020 election was rigged. (After being convicted, Donald Trump said Thursday night that “our whole country is being rigged.”) Rather than accept that social mores are evolving, the New Apostolic Reformation (the folks who brought Mrs. Alito’s beloved “Appeal to Heaven” flag back into vogue) believes that demons are possessing our entire population.

So Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels, didn’t steal classified documents from the White House, didn’t use racist slurs back in The Apprentice days (even though it’s apparently caught on tape), didn’t alter a map of a hurricane’s path with a Sharpie, didn’t say that COVID-19 would just “go away” 38 times between February and December 2020, didn’t stiff his own contractors and lawyers over a period of 30 years, didn’t know anything about the repeated eruptions of Nazi imagery in his own advertisements, didn’t incite the rioters on Jan. 6, and doesn’t even wear makeup or have a combover. It’s all just a liberal conspiracy.

All this is easier, psychologists tell us, than to admit the truth: that for the sake of Israel, some American Jews will put up with absolutely anything. Even white supremacists, even felony convictions stemming from an adulterous affair and continued lies about it, even the vulgarizing of our public discourse to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

In 2016, Trump once quipped that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still rally behind him. Is this true, I wonder, of his Jewish supporters? Is there no red line that he could yet cross?

Deuteronomy 16:20 commands “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue, so that you may live, and inherit the land which God has given you.” Notice the conditional: justice is not merely a positive moral virtue, but a necessary condition of fulfilling our destinies, and of life itself. If we’re willing to sacrifice that — if we rationalize Trump’s criminality and contempt for the law — then we have lost what we’re trying to protect. For the sake of a nationalist bowl of porridge, we will have given away our birthright as Jews.

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