(Jewish Group) Using Jews to shield against accusations of racism won't work when you're antisemitic

(Actual title) Donald Trump, using Jewish people like me as a shield against accusations of racism doesn’t work when you’re antisemitic

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

The president of the United States is a racist. We know this because he enacts racist legislation and consistently says racist things. This week, the shrivelled fig leaf of his deniability took another shredding as he defended a tweet suggesting that four Democratic congresswomen of colour “go back” to the countries they “originally came from”, and later doubled down on his position at a rally on Wednesday night.

This is not subtle stuff but the kind of racism that gets drunken uncles blacklisted from family weddings. At this point, it’s worth remembering that no scintigram has ever uncovered a racist bone in someone’s body.

Sent out to defend the president, his most loyal and media-savvy attack dog Kellyanne Conway answered a Jewish reporter’s question by demanding his ethnicity. It shouldn’t need stating how dangerous and irrelevant such a question is but that the reporter was Jewish was coincidental and played, infuriatingly, into the White House’s hands; Conway later tweeted a further defence against charges of her own racism by attacking Ilhan Omar, one of the aforementioned congresswomen, who in February apologised for a tweet that employed an antisemitic trope in reference to a pro-Israeli lobby group.

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But Trump’s willingness to employ Israel in general – and sometimes Kushner in particular – as a human shield against accusations of his evident bigotry tells you all you need to know about his true feelings towards communities often falsely assumed to be aligned to his interests.

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