Donald Trump’s repeated assertion on Thursday that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with” his loss if Kamala Harris prevailed on Election Day set off a mix of outrage and concern among Jewish leaders on Friday, raising fears that ardent supporters of the former president could be incited against Jews in an era of rising political violence.
“With all I have done for Israel, I received only 24 percent of the Jewish vote” in 2020, Mr. Trump said in Washington on Thursday afternoon in a speech to a largely Jewish audience at a campaign event billed as about “fighting antisemitism in America.”
“In my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” he added.
Shortly after, Mr. Trump repeated that argument in a speech at the annual summit of the Israeli American Council, a hawkish pro-Israel and right-leaning group, saying, “If I don’t win this election,” then “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”
Jews make up only about 2.4 percent of the United States population, with the biggest concentrations in New York, Florida and California, which are outside the presidential battlegrounds. In an extremely tight election, they could make a difference in swing states, but the same could be said for many other ethnic, religious and racial groups.
And Mr. Trump’s comments come at a time when many Jews feel squeezed between overt antisemitism on the right and a rising antisemitic strain among pro-Palestinian activists on the left.
“Pre-emptively blaming American Jews for your potential election loss does zero to help American Jews,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-led human rights group, said on Friday in response to Mr. Trump. “It increases their sense of alienation in a moment of vulnerability when right-wing extremists and left-wing anti-Zionists continually demonize and slander Jews.”
Mr. Greenblatt continued: “Let’s be clear, this speech likely will spark more hostility and further inflame an already bad situation. Calling out hate is important, but I can’t overstate how the message is diluted and damaged when you employ hate to make your point.”
Mr. Trump’s institutional support among right-leaning Jews has remained solid. Matthew Brooks, the longtime head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, staunchly defended the former president’s comments, calling them “Trump being Trump.”
Mr. Brooks said his organization had been saying all year that in an extremely tight election, Jewish votes for Mr. Trump in swing states could secure victory. All Mr. Trump was doing was stating the converse, he argued: that Jewish voters could cost him the election.
“At the end of the day, you can’t look at Donald Trump and believe he endorses or supports any antisemitism,” Mr. Brooks said.
But Nathan J. Diament, executive director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which leans conservative, said he was troubled by Mr. Trump’s remarks, which he was present for.
On the one hand, Mr. Diament said, Mr. Trump had been recounting how his support among Jewish voters had grown from 2016 to 2020 as he consistently demonstrated his support for Israel’s government. And he said that Mr. Trump’s assertion that Jewish voters could make a difference in 2024 was accurate.
“As an analytical point, some portion of the Jewish vote is a swing vote and can be impactful,” Mr. Diament said.
But he said he was nonetheless disturbed by Mr. Trump’s remarks.
“It is concerning for him or any candidate to say, ‘If I lose, it’s because of a specific group,’” Mr. Diament said. “That is the kind of accusation that can be misused and abused by people who are enemies of the Jewish people.”
Jewish votes might be comparatively few, but among Jews, the 2024 election has been fraught. Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the retaliatory war in Gaza have raised tensions between the traditionally pro-Israel center of the Democratic Party and an increasingly vocal left that wants the party to break with the Jewish state.
Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, have tried to exploit that divide to woo Jewish voters and their campaign donations.
But the Republican Party also has the support of open antisemites, a point that was back in the news on Thursday when CNN reported that the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who is running to be the state’s governor, had once called himself a “black NAZI!”
Jewish Republicans, too, have had a difficult relationship with Mr. Trump at times. After Mr. Trump blamed “both sides” for the bloody, antisemitic march in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, his White House Economic Council director, Gary D. Cohn, said the Trump administration “can and must do better” to condemn hate. He drafted a letter of resignation, though he did not submit it.
The Republican Jewish Coalition has had its own struggles with Mr. Trump. Without condemning Mr. Trump, the coalition denounced what it called “the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes” in 2022, just after the former president dined at his Florida home with Mr. West, the antisemitic rapper now known as Ye, and Mr. Fuentes, a white supremacist. The coalition called “on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”
The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021, was the biggest backer of the Republican Jewish Coalition as well as a founder of the Israeli American Council and a key Trump ally. Mr. Trump has sought support from his widow, Miriam Adelson, who after sitting out the 2024 Republican primary has returned to Mr. Trump’s fold.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel last Oct. 7, the coalition offered President Biden high praise for what Mr. Brooks called his “tremendous” and “unwavering support” of Israel.
Now, however, the coalition is all in on Mr. Trump’s election.
“When he says Jews need to have their head examined, he’s absolutely right,” Mr. Brooks said of Mr. Trump’s repeated assertion that the Jewish tilt toward Democrats is illogical given Republicans’ support for Israel and the rise of antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian left.
Ms. Harris’s campaign pushed back hard on any defense of Mr. Trump’s words. Morgan Finkelstein, a campaign spokeswoman, accused the former president of “resorting to the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book.”
“When Donald Trump loses this election,” he said, “it will be because Americans from all faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds came together to turn the page on the divisiveness he demonstrates every day.”
A majority of American Jews have sided with Democrats since the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Until Mr. Trump, Republican support for the Israeli government had at least as much to do with courting evangelical Christian voters as with vying for Jewish ones.
But Mr. Trump has repeatedly told American Jews, in what many consider condescending or offensive terms, that his policies in the Middle East should have won them over.
This summer, Mr. Trump claimed that Ms. Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” and seemed to agree with a radio host who called her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.”
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