Over and over again, the Trump administration has claimed to be fighting antisemitism while wielding power against its domestic enemies. Yet, at the same time, there’s been a troubling surge in antisemitism among MAGA influencers and even some Trump administration staff.

Concern for the safety of the Jewish community has been the stated motivation for two of Donald Trump’s most recent aggressive moves — cutting $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University and attempting to deport one of its graduate students, green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil, in retaliation for his pro-Palestinian activism.

Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” the Trump administration wrote in a March 13 letter to the university. The administration is threatening to expand this funding cutoff, investigating over 60 universities and colleges on suspicion of tolerating or encouraging antisemitism.

On the other hand, the first two months of the Trump administration have been marked by continued antisemetic rhetoric and gestures from the president’s allies. Elon Musk did two apparent Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration — a gesture top adviser Steve Bannon later repeated (Musk and Bannon deny performing the gesture intentionally). The Trump administration gave a Pentagon spokesperson job to a woman with a long history of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Just last Friday, the head of the Trump Department of Justice’s antisemitism task force — an attorney named Leo Terrell — approvingly retweeted a post about Judaism by an infamous white nationalist.

Top MAGA podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von have hosted prominent right-wingers like Candace Owens, who has a long track record of embracing antisemitic ideas, and Ian Carroll, who has blamed Israel for 9/11 (and spread many other antisemitic conspiracy theories), for friendly chats. Both Rogan and Tucker Carlson, arguably the two biggest media stars on the Trumpy right, have taped episodes with Hitler apologist Darryl Cooper.

It’s gotten so bad that even Christopher Rufo, one of the movement’s leading lights, recently admitted that the right has an “antisemitic influencer problem,” warning his comrades that they are being infected by a “poison” that must be rejected for the good of the movement.

So is the Trump administration friendly to Jews, as they claim, or threatening to us? The answer is that it depends on what kind of Jew you are — or, perhaps, where you live. The MAGA right’s approach can best be described as “pro-Israel antisemitism”: a simultaneous embrace of the Jewish state and attack on American Jews’ place in American........

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