The Elon Musk-Donald Trump love fest was short on facts — and long on attacks on Jews
Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump promoted a dangerous, fact-free vision of U.S. Jews’ relationship with Israel. Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM,BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Image
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman August 13, 2024
As Israel faces the near-certainty of an impending Iranian attack, former President Donald Trump took to social media to attack … Jews.
During a nearly two-hour live conversation with Elon Musk on the platform X, formerly Twitter, which Musk owns, Trump noted that an Iranian attack that could “obliterate” Israel was imminent. Israel’s precarious situation, he suggested, meant that any Jew thinking of voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, was, essentially, mentally ill.
“If you’re a Jewish person, if you vote for her, you ought to have your head examined,” Trump said.
It was a line he has used before. But at such a fraught moment in Jewish history, it reaffirmed his uncanny knack for using crisis not to bring people together, but rather to trash opponents in a way that, by stoking divisions, boosts his own interests.
Given the chance to say anything he wanted on Monday night, Trump chose to divide the country in the face of a common enemy.
Think about it. He could have laid out the connections between the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah, and spoken about the threats Iran has posed to American soldiers and interests. He could have stressed that it is in the interest of all Americans to support Israel — as the majority of elected officials of both parties do — in the coming days.
He could have offered some words of concern for Israelis facing attack, for the hostages, for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Instead, on the eve of Tisha B’Av, a somber day that marks the destruction of the Second Temple during a period when Jews were deeply divided, Trump pressed just a little harder on the bruise of division.
And Musk enabled him. The billionaire entrepreneur, who has his own record of antisemitic comments, used the one-on-one to offer his full-throated support of Trump — and tacitly endorse his dubious ideas about Jews and Israel alike.
When Trump told Musk he’s better for Jews on issues concerning Israel and antisemitism than Harris, Musk could have asked a simple question: “How?”
Instead, as he did for the entirety of the conversation, Musk agreed as Trump pivoted from that assertion to one that, “There’s no respect for the United States of America with these people,” referring to Harris and President Joe Biden. “And I’m telling you, she’ll be worse than him, because she’s a believer in being radical left, and he wasn’t.”
“I think you’re right,” Musk said, claiming that Harris’s record is “far left.”
None of these claims were backed up with details or facts — which, in the case of Harris and Israel, are not difficult to find. It was, as Musk said, “just his opinion.”
But his opinions, at least as far as Harris and Israel are concerned, are not rooted in reality.
If the far left in America is defined in part by a desire to withdraw American support for Israel, Harris has done the opposite. She doesn’t support an arms embargo against Israel. In April, she and Biden pushed for passage of $15 billion in supplemental security aid to Israel. She met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Washington in June — yes, really, although you wouldn’t know it from Musk and Trump’s conversation. The duo agreed, fact-free, that she stood him up.
Uh, not quite. “From when I was a young girl collecting funds to plant trees for Israel to my time in the United States Senate,” Harris said in welcoming Netanyahu, “and now at the White House, I have had an unwavering commitment to the existence of the state of Israel to its security and to the people of Israel. I’ve said it many times but it bears repeating. Israel has a right to defend itself.”
I get it. The conversation on X was a two-person campaign rally that some 1.2 million people got to listen in on (after almost an hour of embarrassing delays due to technical glitches). It wasn’t meant to be a serious policy discussion, and Musk made it clear from the start he was there to chat — not debate, or challenge, or even raise a single contradictory question. Trump had the floor, and he took it.
Had he been president, he told Musk, Hamas would never have attacked Israel, and Iran wouldn’t dare attack Israel. (These are all standards of the new Trump stump speech, with, again, no evidence to back them up.) In fact, Iran attacked a U.S. drone in 2019 and Trump called off a retaliatory strike, fearing casualties.
“In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do,” wrote John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, in his 2020 book The Room Where It Happened.
In 2020, Iran attacked a U.S. military base in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S.-ordered assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump bragged at the time that no one was hurt — despite the fact that 110 service personnel suffered traumatic head injuries, which Trump dismissed as “headaches.”
These are the kinds of facts that were sorely missing from the very public meeting of the Trump-Musk mutual appreciation society. At any other time, it would be just politics as usual. But given the weight of the moment, as the Middle East threatens to explode, something else was called for.
Perhaps something like a call for unity in the face of true threats — something like what then-Senator Kamala Harris told a 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention.
“I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue,” she said “And as long as I’m a United States Senator I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”
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