Instead of being showered with Hosannas after moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, he’s stuck with a thorny crown. Trump could have taken a page out of Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign playbook and patiently wooed Jewish voters. Rather, the 45th president let his emotional incontinence rule the day, complaining about “disloyal Jews” who don’t appreciate what he’s done for their country, meaning Israel, and once again his numbers are heading south.
Nixon was different, at least when it came to Jewish voters. Unlike Trump, he knew how to play the long game—at least in the light of day when he was sober, and when the late Rev. Billy Graham wasn’t around to commiserate over Jews and America’s purported decline.
And it’s not that Nixon had much choice. In 1960 and again in 1968, Nixon had garnered only about one-sixth of the Jewish vote, and it would take more than two decades before another Republican, George H.W. Bush in 1992, fared so poorly (actually worse) with Jewish voters.
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As far as Nixon went, Jewish erosion in support for the party of FDR and JFK did not immediately happen. Even in the aftermath of the urban riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the televised, bloody, and tear-gas filled melee inside and outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention, Jews kept the faith with the Democratic Party.
For example, on a Saturday night in October 1968, a crowd thronged the streets of Borough Park, a predominately Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, to cheer on Vice President Hubert Humphrey. That evening the possibility of a mass voter defection to the GOP, just four years later, was nowhere on the horizon. Or so it seemed.
But then the New Left, black nationalism, and an overtly anti-Semitic school board fight in New York City all seemed to suddenly converge in an acrid storm. In December 1968, just weeks after Nixon’s win, WBAI-FM, a local listener-supported radio station went so far as to air this rant aimed at Albert Shanker, the head of New York City’s teachers union: “Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulka on your head/you pale-faced Jew boy, I wish you were dead.”
The personal would become the political, battle lines would be drawn, and Nixon’s message of “law and order” would find belated purchase among Jewish voters. To top it off, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, made Israel-supporters nervous. There was plenty of tinder strewn on the ground.
McGovern’s message of “come home America” left Jews wondering whether the U.S. would remain in Israel’s corner if war broke out again in the Middle East. In hindsight, it was a well-placed concern. Vietnam emerged as a proxy for broader foreign policy anxieties.
In other words, the table was set for Nixon to make serious inroads with Jewish voters, which he ultimately did. During the summer of 1972, Borough Park would become home to a Nixon campaign storefront, just yards away from the spot of the Humphrey rally. Hebrew-lettered Nixon buttons, bumper signs, and posters filled the avenues while Yiddish language announcements blared from sound trucks and cars.
CREEP had come to town in a truly strategic move. It was way more than ritualized ethnic pandering. Rather, it was all about snagging New York’s critical 41 electoral votes, and it actually paid off in a landslide.
On election night, Borough Park went Republican, as did New York State. Nationally, Nixon garnered a healthy 35 percent of the Jewish vote, doubling his performance of four years earlier and hitting a number that harked back to President Eisenhower’s performances in 1952 (36 percent) and 1956 (40 percent).
Make no mistake, Tricky Dick was no Ike, but Nixon possessed patience, unlike Trump. Moreover, his key Jewish advisers were the likes of the late and great Bill Safire and Washington super-lawyer Len Garment—not Jared Kushner or Michael Cohen.
In public, Nixon knew how not to offend, and did not turn his pitch for Jewish votes into a test of communal solidarity. He touted arms sales to Israel, and looked for a sizable but historically reasonable pickup.
Likewise, Nixon’s ambassador to Israel, Walworth Barbour, did not lambaste the Jewish community for failing to march in lockstep. Unlike David Friedman, Trump’s longtime Trump lawyer and current ambassador to the Jewish State, Barbour did not call liberal Jews “worse than kapos.”
Sure, Nixon had key aide Fred Malek do a head count of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and would complain to Graham, but that was kept private until it wasn’t.
By contrast, in Trumpworld there’s no such thing as a filter. His minions instantly leak, if not reflect, their boss’s rage and sentiments.
From the get-go, Trump has calculated that he could simultaneously treat Jews as political piñatas, pander on Israel, and still win hearts, minds, and ballots—a very tall order.
To be clear, both Trump’s earlier presidential campaign and the Republicans’ midterm drive were repeatedly marred by Jew-baiting from on high. Pepe became a meme and mascot. The 2018 massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, days before the Democrats recaptured the House, was not unforeseeable fallout.
The Jews of Borough Park are now squarely in Trump’s corner. But more broadly, Trump shows no signs of stitching that portion of the electorate into a larger political tapestry.
Right now, more American Jews aren’t bowing to “Donald King of Israel” or to his “Second Coming.”
