The Founders knew that Americans, for better or worse, had an insatiable desire for overseas trade. “They are as aquatic as the tortoises and sea-fowl,” observed John Adams, “and the love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures, is a habit in them as unalterable as their natures.” As early as 1785 he foresaw that Americans would be compelled to form “connections with Europe, Asia, and Africa,” and he advised that “the sooner we form those connections into a judicious system, the better it will be for us and our children.” Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to cease all commerce with the rest of the world and rely on the simple virtues of the “yeoman farmer,” but he knew this was impossible. “Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce … and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum.” Even that much-caricatured “Jacksonian,” Andrew Jackson himself, as president never fired a shot in anger but negotiated more trade agreements with foreign powers than any of his predecessors.

The American love of trade made using the practice as a weapon against other nations difficult. When Jefferson forgot his own lesson and tried to embargo trade with Great Britain in 1807 in response to the British navy’s abuse of American merchants on the high seas, his efforts backfired, stirring talk of secession in the New England states that conducted most of that trade. It turned out to be easier to get Americans to support a shooting war with Great Britain than a trade war.

Donald Trump is now learning the hard way how vulnerable America is when it comes to trade wars. This is not because the United States doesn’t in theory hold the strongest hand. The American market is the most desired in the world, and any restriction on access to that market should hurt other countries more than it hurts the United States. The ratio of international trade to GDP for the U.S. is roughly 25 percent, compared with more than 60 percent on average for all other nations. In Germany, foreign trade tallies up to 90 percent of GDP. That ought to make the country vulnerable and give the United States leverage. In practice, however, Americans have proved time and again that they have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to trade wars. Jefferson was not wrong to believe that Britain depended heavily on American trade when he launched his embargo in 1807; what he did not anticipate was that his own citizens would cave before Britain did.

[Read: How Republicans learned to love high prices]

The problem is, or at least has been up until now, democracy, and, more specifically, electoral politics in a federal system where narrow, local interests can have broad national political impact. A trade dispute might harm only one sector of the economy, but if that sector happens to coincide with a crucial voting bloc, it can put the United States at a disadvantage in a contest with a nominally weaker power.

A good example of this came during World War I, before the United States had entered the war and Woodrow Wilson was trying to navigate his way through British blockades and German submarine attacks on transatlantic shipping while desperately trying to preserve American neutrality. The United States was far less reliant on international trade then; it was only 11 percent of GDP. But as Wilson learned, even damage to particular sectors of the economy could threaten political upheaval. Although his personal inclinations were pro-British, for instance, London’s threats to blockade cotton as contraband of war infuriated the Democrats’ key southern constituency. Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, recalled spending “more sleepless nights thinking about cotton” than about anything else during his time in office. The rest of his sleepless nights were spent worrying about finding markets for midwestern grain, much of which had been purchased by Germany and other European nations prior to the war. These specific sectors, because they involved states and regions essential to national political coalitions, had influence on American decision making that exceeded their overall importance to the American economy.  

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Trump must believe, as Jefferson did, that the world needs America more than America needs the world, and he may be right—in theory. The problem is that individual voting blocs mean more to him than carrying out a consistent trade war, as he has repeatedly demonstrated during both terms in office. In his first term, the damage done to farmers by his tariffs on imports was sufficiently threatening politically that he had to spend much of the money gained by the tariffs to compensate the farmers for their losses. His vacillations and emendations in his latest rounds of tariffs this year have been similarly motivated by his desire not to alienate Republican voters in particular states—northern-tier states that rely heavily on trade with Canada and automaking states that stand to lose badly from tariffs on auto parts, steel, and aluminum crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. It is no accident that among the Europeans’ first retaliatory tariffs have been those against Harley-Davidson and American whiskey. Other nations may know their history better than Trump does and have figured out that tariffing sectors of the economy that hit Trump voters can have an impact beyond their dollar value. The United States is a nation split down the middle politically, so marginal voting groups can have a huge effect. This significantly vitiates the American advantage.

It would be one thing if Trump’s supporters were willing to suffer economic hardship in order to show their support for the MAGA way. As Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put it, “There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” but “no pain, no gain.” The problem for Trump is that, so far, as in the past, even his own voters don’t have much tolerance for pain.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.

In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation.

Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.”

The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol.

That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction.

Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him.

During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection.

Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism]

Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.”

Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right.

The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.

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