Former President Donald Trump shared a post on his Truth Social platform Sunday evening accusing “liberal Jews” of voting to “destroy” America and Israel.
“Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America and Israel because you believed in false narratives!” said the post, which appeared on the weekend of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake and make better choices in the future!”
The post touted, among other things, Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
It is unclear what prompted his post. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Prominent Jewish advocacy groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and J Street, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michelle Terris, the founder of JEXIT, an organization that says its mission is to “educate and encourage” Jewish Americans to leave the Democratic Party, confirmed to NBC News that Trump’s message came from a JEXIT flyer posted on Instagram on Sunday.
Terris said her organization believes Trump shared the message on his Truth Social account after meeting with board member Siggy Flicker last weekend. She also clarified that the organization’s flyer was originally posted in 2018 and has been used for years.
“We believe he shared it on Truth Social because he is so proud of his support for the Jewish community in America and for the State of Israel,” Terris said.
“We are grateful to the former president for sharing this on his Truth Social account,” she added. “As our post states, there is no greater friend to American Jews and the State of Israel than fmr. President Donald J. Trump and we are deeply concerned that many liberal Jews in America do not recognize the FMR. The history of the president’s achievements in supporting our people and instead blindly voting for the Democratic Party.”
Other groups, however, said Trump’s post plays into the anti-Semitic trope that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel. The content of the post also reflects his previous comments in which he claimed broad support in Israel for his policies, in contrast to many Jewish voters in the US, who often vote Democratic.
The American Jewish Committee asked for comment and pointed out a tweet it posted on monday condemning Trump’s post: “To claim that American Jews who did not vote for Mr. Trump voted to destroy America and Israel is deeply offensive and divisive.”
“As we approach one year until the next election, we urge political candidates from top to bottom to avoid inflammatory rhetoric.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, also denounced Trump’s post in a statement, saying, “It is dangerous and wrong to suggest that an entire segment of the Jewish population voted to destroy America and Israel.”
“Whether intentional or not, President Trump is playing into conspiracy theories about dual loyalty here,” he said. “Worse still, this happens on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah. Even as an organization that has supported many of these policy decisions, ADL does not believe our community should be lectured on how to vote.”
Trump faced similar backlash last year for saying that Jews in the US needed to “get their act together” and “appreciate” Israel “before it’s too late.”
“No president has done more for Israel than me. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our great evangelicals value this far more than people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last year.
“Those living in Israel, however, are a different story – the highest approval rating in the world could easily be Prime Minister!” he continued.
Some critics at the time viewed Trump’s comments as a threat to the Jewish community.
Greenblatt accused Trump of ‘Jewsplaining’ at the time tweet“We don’t need the former president, who is favored by extremists and anti-Semites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It’s not about a ‘quid pro quo’; it is based on shared values and security interests. ‘is insulting and disgusting’.
The then editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, Yaakov Katz, tweeted: “Nothing to see here. Just a former American president using threatening language about American Jews at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide.”
Retired Army Colonel Alexander Vindman, in a tweetaccused Trump of “executing the fascist playbook to turn his mob against the Jews.”
In a 2021 interview, Trump also said, “The Jewish people in the United States do not love or care about Israel.”
“I will tell you that evangelical Christians love Israel more than they love Jews in this country,” said Trump, who received strong support from white evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump also came under fire for his comments following the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, white nationalists and neo-Nazis carried tiki torches and chanted, among other things, “Jews will not replace us ‘.
Trump told the media after the meeting: “You had some really nice people on both sides as well. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of a statue that was very important to them and the renaming of a Robert E. Lee park to another name. You had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, they should be fully condemned – you had a lot of people in that group other than the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
Trump continued to defend his comments about the white nationalist rally after Joe Biden announced his 2019 presidential campaign and condemned Trump’s response to Charlottesville. Trump reiterated that he was referring to one reason for the meeting: the removal of the monument to Lee, a Confederate general, from a city park.
“If you look at what I said, you’ll see that that question was answered perfectly,” he said in 2019. “And I was talking about people who went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
Trump’s team also had to do damage control last year after a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who has come under fire for making anti-Semitic comments — and a white supremacist, Nick Fuentes.
Trump said he did not know the identity of Fuentes, a known Holocaust denier, who arrived unexpectedly with the rapper.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
