Trump administration is dangerously hypocritical on antisemitism

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine the Trump administration’s response to tolerance for antisemitism by officials at a hypothetical left-leaning university, many of whose students are Jewish. The university’s president once dined publicly with notorious antisemites. A vice president embraced an extreme European political party known for antisemitism. Multiple university officials have ties to extremist, antisemitic figures.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon might perhaps write a blistering letter to the university, declaring its conduct “totally unacceptable,” commence a civil rights investigation and cut off all federal funding. “Receiving such taxpayer funds is a privilege, not a right,” she might proclaim. The Department of Justice might launch a criminal investigation.

The university in this thought experiment is, in fact, the Trump administration itself.

President Trump dined in 2022 at his Mar-a-Lago club with two open antisemites: the rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Ye has since released a song glorifying Hitler. Fuentes once said that the U.S. has a “Jewish occupied” government. Trump claimed he had not invited or known anything about Fuentes, but has not apologized beyond that.

Vice President JD Vance met with the leader of Germany’s right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Its leaders have promoted the Nazi-tinged “Great Replacement Theory” and downplayed the Holocaust as “blip” in German history. Vance went so far as to chastise German leaders for not recognizing AfD as a legitimate, mainstream political party.

Investigative reporting by NPR revealed that multiple Trump White House officials have “close ties to anti-Semitic extremists.” McMahon has written many letters to university administrators using similar zero-tolerance language.

The thought experiment is not a game of whataboutism — it exposes a dangerous hypocrisy. The Trump administration’s crackdown on college antisemitism serves as cynical camouflage for reengineering intellectual and political life on campuses.

Campus antisemitism is a serious, deeply troubling issue that many university administrators were far too slow to acknowledge after the start of the Israel-Hamas war. But the Trump administration is attempting to fight one virulent cancer with another, using authoritarian overreach to counter bigotry. This is beginning to alarm even some conservatives.

The influential right-wing writer Richard Hanania recently stated in the Economist that, in its attack on campus antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusions programs, the Trump administration “seeks to dismantle institutions via demands that are both illegal and unworkable.” These include auditing academic disciplines for “ideological capture,” enforcing “viewpoint diversity” and screening out foreign students deemed insufficiently aligned with “American values.”

The stakes for institutions like Harvard couldn’t be higher. For whether Harvard surrenders its academic freedoms or collapses under the loss of federal funding, the administration wins.

Think that’s hyperbolic? Consider that in a 2021 speech Vance called universities the “enemy” and argued that “we must aggressively attack the university in this country.” The campus antisemitism unleashed after the Oct. 7 attacks, and the woefully inadequate response from some university administrators, created a golden opportunity for those in the Trump administration determined to take down higher education. And they are seizing it. 

Conservative pushback like Hanania’s is still dishearteningly rare. Yet it’s hard to imagine the same silent conservatives not expressing outrage if a Democratic administration attempted to impose comparable constraints on conservative universities like Baylor or Clemson.

If the Trump administration’s assault on Harvard’s academic freedoms ultimately leads to the university’s collapse, perhaps Vance will cheerfully explain, to paraphrase the ironic saying from the Vietnam War, that “it became necessary to destroy Harvard to save it from antisemitism.”

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”