Since I’ve never called Donald Trump an antisemite, although others surely have, I am neither upset nor mollified by suggestions that he is not one. It’s mostly irrelevant to me, since I care what presidents do but am not particularly interested in what they think. But of course I would prefer that my elected officials not be Jew-haters, while noting that this is what we call a low bar, and that managing to surmount it exacts precisely zero admiration or forbearance from me, or from any decent and sensible person. It is also true, however, that this president has been more than happy to welcome the Jew-hating or, at a minimum, Jew-hating-adjacent to his regime. Indeed, sometimes he is happy to work mightily to advance the fortunes of those who easily fit that description.
A leading example is the Pride of Ithaca, stripling lawyer Paul Ingrassia (Cornell Law ’22). What a resume: New York Young Republican (natch), new-media grifter, alleged uber-creep, more-than-vaguely-homoerotic admirer of Andrew Tate (“an extraordinary human being“), and frequent Mar-a-Lago guest. Ingrassia’s career has been a walking answer to the question how much Donald Trump weighs personal loyalty in an executive branch appointee as against qualities such as having the qualifications of a lintel, the instincts of a snake-oil salesman, and the morals of an Obersturmführer. The latest is this story divulging his unguarded thoughts in a text chat with “Republican operatives and influencers.” He touches on Martin Luther King Day (belongs in hell), holidays involving black Americans (ditto, plus a racial epithet), all black people (same), nondiscrimination and natural law (“The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal”), other non-whites (“Never trust a chinaman or Indian”), knowing “what time it is”–the phrase “Don’t be a boomer…I don’t mind being a scumbag from time to time” is a fairly remarkable generational statement, given its suggestion that not being a racist is old-fashioned, while being a “scumbag” is, like, totally now. And, of course, his longer-term objects of emulation: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”
I am not normally much interested in this sort of thing, largely because it is difficult to judge the mix of sincerity, shock-jockery, self-mockery, and other qualities in such conversations and partly because, despite the gross sins doing so leaves uncovered, it’s worth maintaining some degree of separation between public and private, especially under a regime that simultaneously rejects government transparency and insists that people be fired for statements in private spaces. But Ingrassia’s “private” remarks are such effective indictments not because they purport to show the truth concealed by his public persona, but rather because they are perfectly consistent with the sorts of things he has said in public many times. They are so powerful because they contain no surprises at all. And it is this man who first was given the job of vetting potential regime appointees (!), then made (by Emil Bove) the White House liaison to the Justice Department (!!), then nominated by Trump to head an office that, of all things, enforces ethics laws. Politics makes for strange bedfellows and every administration ends up acceding to plenty of hires, generally made lower down the chain, that it should in all decency reject. What is unusual about this regime is that the more awful the pick, the more likely it is that the president himself demanded that the nominee be invited between the sheets.
If Ingrassia’s nomination is formally killed, it will be largely because many members of the Senate, including Republicans, refused to swallow it. (Indeed, since I wrote the first draft of this post, various Senate Republicans have finally said just that.) And due credit is owed to them. What is more remarkable is how much of a crucible he appears to pose for normal erstwhile-conservative commentators. No Jew-hater on campus is too lowly not to be ferreted out and identified; contrariwise, no office in the executive branch is too high for a Jew-hater or friend of Jew-haters not to be publicly ignored, to go unmentioned and uncondemned, whatever may be said about him in private. It’s not as if Ingrassia is unknown or unheralded (by Trump himself; he frequently quoted or reposted Ingrassia on social media). On a scale of one to ten for efforts to root out the antisemitic or generally morally abhorrent from one’s own sanctum, however, the formerly-conservative response to Ingrassia rates somewhere around, well, whatever number represents Jeremy Corbyn.
I don’t say this to bash conservatives or conservatism. To the contrary, there has never been a moment when actual conservatism, and actual conservative intellectuals, were more necessary, what with this being the least conservative regime in the past 80 years. And many actual conservatives–you can usually identify them by the string of comments on social media accusing them of being traitors and reading them out of the movement–have risen to the occasion splendidly. Kevin Williamson, with whom I no doubt disagree about plenty of things, is a far more effective critic and interlocutor of Trump and Trumpism than someone like Michelle Goldberg could ever hope to be, because his sense of the values that are being besmirched is far more visceral and his actual or potential audience more relevant. Nor do I wish to overstate Ingrassia’s importance; it’s not as if he was nominated for attorney general. (You will recall that Trump, in his finite wisdom, chose the not-quite-sex-criminal for that office.) I wouldn’t expect frequent or banner headlines.
But it is striking that Ingrassia, an utterly easy figure of condemnation who is still, as of this moment, a presidentially handpicked nominee for appointed office in the executive branch, draws a “Sorry, nothing to display” in a search of the Washington Free Beacon, goose eggs from a search of no-item-too-trivial aggregators like InstaPundit, nothing from Fox except a credulous safe space from which to deliver a “some of my best friends” self-defense, and bupkis from “conservative” commentary sites like American Greatness. (Well, bupkis aside from contributions by Ingrassia, a frequent contributor through early 2024, himself.) And it is perhaps indicative of the fracture, rot, or death of American conservatism that the National Review, in which Ingrassia once published, has mentioned him critically several times this year–but that virtually all of the criticisms came from Jay Nordlinger, who is no longer at the National Review and is now a contributing editor at The Dispatch.
Ingrassia is either a measure of the extent to which the regnant right wing is simply anti-conservative and more than happy to shake hands with fascism and nihilism, or–I say with sorrow–a measure of the cowardice that afflicts those soi-disant conservatives who cling to the regime against what I would have thought were their own oft-stated moral, political, and religious principles. If you can’t, won’t, or are afraid to condemn someone like Paul Ingrassia publicly as unworthy of any nomination to any office, what good are those principles? Keep in mind that I’m talking about purported writers and intellectuals, who either have their words and their principles, and use them, or have nothing. It will be easy to kick Ingrassia now that he’s down. If they couldn’t even pass the test of publicly kicking him when he was up, just what test won’t they fail? And if the president is pleased to advance the career of such a cretin, why exactly am I supposed to care that he’s “not an antisemite?”