The Trump inner circle cannot all get along.

The Trump administration is undergoing some kind of riftapalooza at the moment. First there was the waning friendship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with the latter floating the idea of starting a new political party. Then there’s been the falling out over foreign policy between the die-hards and the Tucker Carlson-aligned. Toss in the complex posthumous drama over the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and it gets messy, messy indeed.

You might think it would be satisfying, to your bog-standard liberal North American Jew, if the Trump administration were to implode from within, thereby creating an opening for Democrats to make their presence known. The trouble is the source of the rift: overzealous philosemitism versus antisemitism. The former has its issues, to put it mildly, but the latter? That’s what you really don’t want.

Trumpism is isolationist (when it suits) and a rejection of an earlier era’s hypersensitivity to marginalized groups. But what if Donald Trump himself—yes, that Donald Trump—is functioning as a kind of check on what would otherwise be a rabidly antisemitic 2025 turn in the GOP? What if Trump’s efforts (however misguided, however harmful) to fight antisemitism, or his pro-Israel inclinations, are all that stand between an antisemitic nativist American right-wing and a merely xenophobic one?

Without Trump (and yes, I’m aware of his “Shylock” remark), what’s left? There’s Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot going on antisemitic if non-sentient tirades, not to mention Musk’s notorious hand gesture. There’s the conspiracy theorizing about Epstein having been a Mossad agent. There’s JD Vance, the vice president, giving a talk at the conservative Claremont Institute, offering up tiers of American belonging, according to which an “ADL” critic of bigots is less American than the bigots they’re criticizing: “‘I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.’”

How antisemitic would Trumpism be in the absence of Trump? This is not an idle question, for Trump the man is mortal, and all politicians have successors. What’s next? I shudder to think.

The intra-MAGA rift is, in a sense, over why to keep........

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