Trump and his administration have a curiously hard time treating discrimination against Jewish people as a significant matter of historical fact. So it was notable when on Tuesday—after Jewish Community Centers around the country had faced bomb threats for weeks, and a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis was vandalized—Trump finally condemned anti-Semitism, and managed to do so without referencing or exaggerating his electoral college victory margin.
But he still failed this most basic test of western democratic leadership.
“Anti-Semitism is horrible and it’s going to stop and it has to stop,” he told MSNBC, before issuing a better-prepared statement from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “This tour was a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms,” Trump said. “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”
Absent from either condemnation was any suggestion that federal law enforcement resources will be used to investigate these crimes. And when he spoke extemporaneously about the issue, he did so with the same “I alone can fix it” monomania that defined his campaign. His authority and power are in his mind the key agents of every human drama, even ones whose main antagonists going back centuries have been authoritarians.