Trump Greets Zelenskyy With Antisemitism

Christofascists want a Jewish leader to bend the knee.

Commenters from across the political spectrum, and across the globe, are denouncing Trump’s disgusting, belligerent effort to bully Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, said the encounter made her “sick to her stomach.” Congressman Sam Liccardo of San Jose said Trump was “betraying the Ukrainian people, he's betraying many longstanding allies, and he's betraying our ideals and our fundamental values as Americans.”

Trump deserves all the criticism and more. Not many people have mentioned, though, that in berating Zelenskyy, Trump was doubling down on his long history of sneering antisemitism. Trump’s attack on a Jewish leader resonates with his own personal bigotry. But it also is a reminder that Putin and Trump are working together to spread Christofascism—an ideology that targets a range of marginalized people, definitely including Jews.

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Bend the knee to Trump

Trump’s own history of antisemitism is well documented. He consistently and repeatedly has suggested that Jewish people owe loyalty to Israel, not to the US, and that, given his support for Zionism, American Jews should be loyal to him.

In 2019, before the 2020 election, Trump said that Jews who voted for Democrats are either ignorant or guilty of “great disloyalty,” invoking the dual loyalty trope that insinuates that Jewish people are unpatriotic, untrustworthy, shifty internationalists. In 2024 at an event opposing antisemitism, Trump again targeted Jewish voters (most of whom cast ballots for Democrats), saying that if he lost it would be the fault of “the Jewish people.” After reiterating his support for Israel, he said, “I say all the time that any Jewish person that votes for [Kamala Harris], especially now, her or the Democrat Party, should have their head examined.”

Trump believes that Jewish voters owe him gratitude and loyalty. he argues that he, as a leader who aggressively identifies with Christianity, should be seen as the one true arbiter of Jewish interests.

Trump and Vance indulged in the same kind of rhetoric in their discussion with Zelenskyy. Vice President and gutter fascist JD Vance sneered that Zelenskyy was being “disrespectful” for daring to contradict Trump “in front of the American media.” He pushed Zelenskyy to thank Trump personally, rather than thanking the America as a whole.

Trump also harped on respect, arguing that Putin broke ceasefire deals because he didn’t respect Biden or Obama. And he wound up by again insisting that Zelenskyy wasn’t sufficiently grateful and didn’t understand how much he owed Trump. “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.”

Trump regularly speaks to Jewish voters as if he is entitled to their reverence, gratitude and loyalty. Similarly, Trump and Vance spoke to Zelenskyy from a position of vaunting entitlement. They presented themselves as more knowledgeable about his country than he is. They demanded that he genuflect to Trump personally; expressing solidarity with the American people was not sufficient.

Part of this performance was simple nativism. Trump and Vance are ugly Americans who think the rest of the world owes them homage. But this grating demand for reverence echoes and is emphasized by the white Christofascist assumption (which again, Trump has expressed on numerous occasions) that Jewish people need to cede leadership to their betters. Trump has shown many times that he believes Jewish people owe reverence and loyalty to Christians who deign to acknowledge their interests—those interests, of course, to be defined solely by the Christofascists.

Bend the knee to Putin

The ugly antisemitic connotations are only uglier in the context of Ukraine’s war with Putin’s Christofascist regime, which is also (to no one’s surprise) openly antisemitic.

Putin has repeatedly smeared Jewish people since the beginning of the war with Ukraine, not so subtly targeting Zelenskyy personally. Most recently, in December, Putin went on an antisemitic screed, blaming “ethnic Jews” who he claimed were trying to “tear apart” the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine has openly supported the Russian invasion, and Ukraine has understandably been trying to limit its influence. Putin reacted to this with a barrage of bigotry. Referring to Jews, he fumed, “These are people without any beliefs, godless people. They’re ethnic Jews, but has anyone seen them in a synagogue? I don’t think so. These are people without kin or memory, with no roots. They don’t cherish what we cherish and what the majority of the Ukrainian people cherish as well.”

The suggestion that Jewish people have no “roots” is a callback to Stalin’s vicious antisemitic attack on Jewish people as “rootless cosmopolitans,” whose lack of nationalist loyalty was a threat to the Soviet state. Stalin, as a Communist, opposed all religion; Putin, a Christofascist with close ties to the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, is tweaking the tropes slightly, claiming that he doesn’t hate all Jews, just those who don’t go to synagogue regularly. Like Trump, Putin, as a Christian fascist, claims the right to decide which Jews are really Jews, which Jews are loyal, and who Jews should be loyal to—or else.

Trump’s contemptuous smears directed at Zelenskyy echo and amplify Putin’s more open antisemitism—antisemitism which Trump has, of course, never denounced. The two Christian nationalist leaders join together in agreeing that Zelenskyy is a Jewish upstart who should surrender to his Christian betters, both in the Oval Office and on the battlefield.

Where are Jewish orgs?

Jewish organizations have condemned Putin’s antisemitism in the past. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has said that Putin is justifying his invasion of Ukraine with “antisemitic lies.” the Anti-Defamation League condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in particular Putin’s use of Holocaust analogies to justify the invasion. The American Jewish Committee issued a statement the week before the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy expressing concern over the way Trump has lied about the start of the war, blaming Ukraine rather than Putin.

So there have been scattered expressions of solidarity with Ukraine, who is faced with an explicitly antisemitic Christofascist invader. But those statements have been muted, to say the least, compared to the wave of outrage and denunciation from Jewish organizations directed at pro-Palestinian protestors calling for an end to human rights violations and genocide by Israel.

That’s not surprising; for many Jews in the US, and especially for Jewish organizations and their wealthy donors, Zionism has become central to American Jewish identity. Solidarity with diasporic Jews in the world beyond Israel has been relegated to, at best, a matter of secondary interest. This is only made worse by the fact that Israel leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu eagerly suck up to Christofascist Zionists, tolerating (and sometimes even encouraging) antisemitism in the diaspora in exchange for weapons with which to bomb Palestinians.

This is unfortunate, to put it mildly. As Putin and Trump demonstrate, the rise of Christofascism is a direct threat to Jewish people, whether in Ukraine or in the US. The casual assumption that Jews should bend the knee to Christians creates a justification for bullying and bombing Jews who refuse to do so.

Zelenskyy defies Trump and Putin on behalf of the Ukrainian people. He’s also defying them on behalf of Jews—and on behalf of all marginalized people who are threatened by the violent ambitions, and grotesque bigotry, of authoritarian tyrants. If Ukraine falls, it will be a victory for fascism. And fascism historically, has not been kind to Jews.