Never mind that the Bowers disliked Trump because he felt he was too soft on “the k— infestation,” he wrote online, using a slur for Jews.
“Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers wrote on one of his social media accounts. But to the President’s defenders, this was a hopeful moment, one they could use to separate Trump from the carnage at Squirrel Hill.
There was an important difference between “a shooter who hates Trump”, wrote conservative writer David French, and the man who loved Trump who sent Trump’s critics all those pipe bombs.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt pointed out that anti-Semitism “transcends the left/right divide”. In these defenders’ minds, this absolves Trump of any guilt.
It doesn’t.
Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences.
During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money”.
A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people”.
Read the article by Julia Ioffe in The Sydney Morning Herald.