Trump’s Jewish Cover Story

The administration claims to be protecting Jews while advancing an agenda that most Jews oppose.

Updated at 12:15 pm ET on April 4, 2025

The Trump administration wants you to know that it’s just looking out for Jews. In recent weeks, the White House has cited anti-Semitism as the motivation for many of its controversial moves, whether deporting foreign students who allegedly engaged in pro-Hamas activism or threatening to pull millions of government dollars from Ivy League schools. “SHALOM COLUMBIA,” quipped the White House’s X account, after it canceled federal funding to the university over its “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”

But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.

Take the detentions and deportations. A handful of high-profile cases purportedly pertain to the targets’ anti-Semitic conduct. But most of them do not. In just the past month, the administration’s immigration agents have reportedly held a former Canadian actor for 12 days across three prisons; jailed a Harvard Medical School researcher for transporting undeclared scientific samples for her boss, and threatened to send her back to Russia, which she had fled; revoked the visa of the two-time president of Costa Rica, apparently over his criticism of Trump; and deported hundreds of Venezuelans—including a makeup artist seeking asylum and a Maryland father with no criminal record—to a notorious prison in El Salvador, some of them possibly on the basis of misunderstood tattoos.

These stories underscore that the administration’s deportation spree is clearly not about defending Jews, but rather part of a broader anti-foreigner agenda whose goal is to make America into a country for a narrowly defined set of citizens. “America is not just an idea,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” U.S. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller put it more bluntly at an October rally: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

This nationalist agenda explains why one of the first things Trump did after assuming office was sign executive orders to end birthright citizenship and suspend refugee resettlement, after which he began deporting foreign-born residents on every possible pretext. Fighting anti-Semitism is not the rationale for this overhaul of the American experiment, so much as it is a convenient crowbar to pry open the door for more ambitious aims. The crackdown on foreign students offers a case in point: Last week, Axios reported that “the Trump administration is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas.’”

The push to purge outsiders from the homeland also explains the crude theatrics that have accompanied the administration’s actions. Having masked agents arrest the Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the street in broad daylight, sharing cartoons that celebrate deportations on social media, and filming Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in front of shaved and shirtless prisoners in El Salvador are all stunts that don’t just target specific people, but sow fear among everyone else. Witnessing the recent roundups, many promising young foreign students will not want to risk coming to an American university, knowing that a change in political leadership could mean a sudden change in their status.

The administration is similarly using Jewish concerns to cloak more aggressive aims in its efforts to defund American universities. Presented as an attempt to protect Jews on campus, these threats are actually part of a much wider war against American higher education, which Trump and his allies perceive as a citadel of hostile cultural power.

“I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vance told the National Conservatism Conference in 2021. Christopher Rufo, one of the most effective and forthright conservative activists against academia, told The New York Times last month that forcing “the university sector as a whole into a significant recession” would be “a very salutary thing,” and that “putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them.”

Rufo has some experience remaking higher education. In 2023, he was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis as a trustee for New College of Florida, where he and his allies shut down the DEI bureaucracy and the gender-studies department and transformed the school, in his words, into a “liberal arts college in the classical tradition.” Now in and out of Washington, Rufo is working to take his “counterrevolution” national. On November 12, 2024, he posted on X, “Abolish the Department of Education.” On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismantling it.

Whatever the merits of this sweeping agenda, most American Jews did not vote for it. During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to expel anti-Israel protesters, and even included a pledge to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN” in the Republican Party platform. Nonetheless, for the third straight presidential election, Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump’s Democratic opponent. By contrast, many protesters against the war in Gaza equivocated and did not endorse Kamala Harris, voted third party, stayed home, or swung to Trump. (Some partisans on social media have demanded that American Jews answer for Trump’s policies—a good example of how Jews, like other minorities, are often scapegoated for majority decisions most of them opposed.)

American Jews did not reject Trump because they approved of the protest movement or how it was handled by universities. On the contrary, many Jews felt abandoned by schools that failed to neutrally enforce their rules when it came to anti-Israel activists, even when some engaged in vandalism and violence; violated time, place, and manner restrictions for campus protests; or prevented other students from learning. Many Jews were similarly shocked when administrators who had bent over backwards to eliminate every possible microaggression against other marginalized groups—down to policing offensive Halloween costumes and poor-taste party invitations—prevaricated in the face of open hostility against Jewish students. Others wondered what happened to the progressive principle that the impact of a statement matters more than its intent when the statements were “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea”—or when Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated the October 7 massacre as “a historic win,” and those behind Columbia’s encampment repeatedly cheered Hamas’s murders of civilians.

These Jews were not asking for special treatment; they were asking to be treated like everyone else on campus, for better or worse. In the words of Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, “Speech or conduct that would constitute harassment if directed against one protected class must also be treated as harassment if directed against another protected class. This must be true not only in the way rules are written, but also in the way they are enforced.”

The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America’s universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institutions’ decimation. Jews are caught in the middle—used by the White House to shield its agenda from criticism, yet attacked by Trump’s critics as enablers of that agenda due to their advocacy for themselves and against anti-Semitism.

Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population and are a famously fractious people. A minority of this minority supports Trump’s policies, seeking the shelter of a strongman amid the anti-Semitic storm. But the lesson most American Jews have drawn from their history as a persecuted people is that narrow nationalisms never end well for those who are different, because no matter their patriotism or contribution to the collective, their difference will always make them suspect. Jews may be inside the circle of concern today, but that circle is always shrinking, and Jews will ultimately not determine who it includes.

“They don’t care about the country at all,” the influential right-wing personality Tucker Carlson told a podcast host in 2023, assailing a prominent Jewish commentator and those like him. “But I do because I have no choice, because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned.” The person he was referring to was the pro-Trump Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro.

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This article originally stated that J. D. Vance was a senator in 2021. He was a Senate candidate.