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He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country?
(JTA) — For years, Imran Ahmed has presented his research on how tech platforms enable the spread of antisemitism to receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum.
He’s worked with the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America; the latter credits Ahmed with the backbone of much of its own policy proposals. He’s appeared at a conference organized by the first Trump administration, with Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also in attendance.
He’s joined Republicans in advocating for an end to Section 230, a law granting special protections to social media platforms. During the first Trump administration, on the strength of his research, the British-born Ahmed received a priority visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” — the so-called “Einstein visa,” after the German-born Jewish physicist.
All of that only added to Ahmed’s befuddlement when, just before Christmas, the current Trump State Department announced it would be revoking his visa because of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted were “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
“It is confusing,” Ahmed told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, speaking from his home in Washington, D.C. “Certainly there was some alarm.”
The confusion came not least because Ahmed, as a legal permanent resident, no longer has a visa to revoke. He received an EB-1 visa, which provides a fast pathway to permanent residency, in January 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term and now has a green card.
Ahmed was different from the four other digital anti-hate activists named in the State Department announcement, all of whom are based in Europe. Since 2021, his organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been registered as a U.S. nonprofit — a status that he notes should confer First Amendment protections. Last year, the group reported $4.2 million in revenue.
Ahmed has received no formal notification of an effort to revoke his residency. Neither Rubio’s own tweet, nor a State Department press release announcing the sanctions, mentioned him. There’s just a tweet, from a State Department undersecretary, mentioning him by name as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”
The State Department did not answer questions about Ahmed’s case. “The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: the United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here,” a spokesperson told JTA in a statement.
At a time of aggressive immigration enforcement activity that has ensnared others with green cards, Ahmed isn’t taking changes. He sought (and was granted) a legal restraining order to prevent the government from seizing him and moving him to an immigrant detention facility without trial, as officials have done to an estimated 59,000 migrants in the last year. On Monday he returned to court, petitioning to make the order permanent.
“We want to make sure that they can’t take me away from my friends, family and support network,” he said. He’s optimistic on that front. “I have faith in the courts, and I have faith that the rule of law is still intact in the United States.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. But Ahmed’s ordeal has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the work of a trusted Jewish communal ally — and further muddled the Trump administration’s own stated commitment to fighting antisemitism.
“Absolutely fascist — and dangerous — effort by the admin to ban my colleague Imran Ahmed and others from the US,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, wrote on X last week.
Ahmed partnered with Spitalnick’s group on a report about the rise of antisemitic influencers on X after Oct. 7. “He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick recently told JTA, noting the two had first connected after the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which one counter-protester was killed.
A columnist at Britain’s Jewish News also criticized the Trump administration’s targeting of Ahmed: “Imran Ahmed was a friend to America and an important voice in debates about free speech,” wrote David Hirsh. “He obeyed the law, just as the Americans he worked with obey the law, and he should be treated the same, while working in and contributing to the United States of America.”
The Trump administration has taken special pains to prevent immigration by Muslims, last month blocking visas for passport holders from 20 mostly Muslim countries and targeting Afghans especially after an Afghan national shot and killed a National Guard member in Washington in November.
Ahmed’s parents are Afghan, and in his column Hirsh called Ahmed, “a brilliant Muslim Brit.” Ahmed, who was born in England, has said that he now considers himself an atheist.
His allies see his case as part of a different Trump administration priority. Spitalnick told JTA the targeting of Ahmed was “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
In the State Department’s targeting of him, Ahmed sees the handiwork of his longtime foes: the tech “oligarchs” who control the social media giants he seeks to rein in.
“This is quite clearly an attempt to silence the work that we do studying and exposing the way that social media platforms encourage, amplify and reward — with money — antisemitism and other forms of hate,” he said. “These guys have been lobbying aggressively in Washington long before President Trump was president. They’ve been invited to the White House and treated like demigods for decades now.”
Fighting antisemitism is central to the CCDH’s origin story, Ahmed said. A former staffer with the British Labour Party with plans to run for office himself, he quit after the 2015 ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, whom Ahmed calls “an avowed antisemite.” (Corbyn, who came to lead Labour amid a party overhaul that saw a massive influx of antisemitic sentiment, was suspended by his party over his handling of the antisemitism issue before ultimately being expelled in 2023.)
Ahmed wanted to understand why what he perceived as a newfound flurry of antisemitic social media activity seemed to follow Corbyn and his allies. He was also disturbed by the 2016 murder of Labour parliamentarian Jo Cox by a far-right figure associated with neo-Nazi groups who had been radicalized online. Together, he reasoned, there was something yet undiscovered about the role social media was playing in pushing out antisemitism across the political spectrum.
“This has always been an organization that, at its heart, has been trying to answer the question, how is it that ancient lies about Jews have been able to gain such purchase in our society?” he said. “And what can we do to change that?”
In the years since Ahmed founded the CCDH (which he relocated to the United States after receiving his green card), his group has published a series of papers on the various ways social media algorithms promote and reward antisemitism and other forms of hate speech. With the ADL, they published a 2023 report on Iranian state media’s use of social media to spread antisemitism. In November, with JFNA, they released a report on how Instagram has effectively monetized antisemitic content.
Ahmed presented those findings at JFNA’s annual meeting, in front of federation heads from around the country; he credits his work with helping groups like JFNA focus more of their attention on the problem of social media algorithms instead of individual bad actors online. A JFNA representative recently told JTA that Ahmed’s research has been integral to the umbrella group’s crafting of its own online antisemitism policy proposals.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Dennis Bernard, a JFNA lay leader who heads their government relations efforts, told JTA.
Ahmed’s work has made him enemies, too. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of X, sued the CCDH in 2023, alleging that it violated the X’s terms of service in gathering data for a report on its amplification of hate content. A judge threw the case out, but Ahmed isn’t so sure Musk — who wielded tremendous power over the federal government at the helm of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and remains close with administration figures, including the president — has moved on.
“I think it’s incredibly telling that the earliest and most vociferous reactions [to the visa sanction] were actually from people like Elon Musk, who himself has spread antisemitic lies and presided over the descent of this platform formerly known as Twitter into a hellscape of antisemitism,” he said. On X, Musk responded to news of the visa sanctions with fire emojis.
If the State Department is indeed targeting activists like Ahmed as a matter of policy, it would seem to be at odds with its newly confirmed special antisemitism envoy, Yehuda Kaploun. He recently indicated that he, too, wanted to see more restrictions on social media platforms that promote antisemitism.
“It makes it very confusing for them to claim foreign policy problems, which is what they’ve claimed, when U.S. foreign policy is to reduce antisemitism,” Ahmed said.
Another possibility: that the State Department’s targeting of Ahmed has to do with something else entirely. In her post blasting him, the public diplomacy undersecretary Sarah Rogers focused on a different research project the CCDH had undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Ahmed’s group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), created the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ report, which called for platforms to deplatform twelve American ‘anti-vaxxers’, including now-HHS Secretary @SecKennedy,” Rogers wrote. She was referring to a 2021 CCDH report finding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and 11 other anti-vaccine activists were responsible for more than 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services, also celebrated the visa restrictions on Ahmed and the others.
Ahmed dismisses the idea. “The pandemic is long over, so it would be very odd to be targeted for work that we did four years ago. That seems implausible to me,” he said.
He is convinced, instead, that he’s being singled out because he seeks to put guardrails on the big technology platforms more generally.
In their case to the judge for the restraining order, Ahmed’s lawyers — including prominent Jewish attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Norm Eisen — brought up one striking comparison: to the pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder detained for months for what the U.S. government argued was exhibiting support for terrorism. Ahmed insists his case and Khalil’s are nothing alike in substance; the government has so few cases of threatening the citizenship of green-card holders that a legal comparison just made sense, he said.
While Spitalnick has vocally rebuked the Trump administration over its targeting of Ahmed, his other Jewish partners have remained relatively quiet. Many Jewish organizations have found themselves torn since Trump took office as the administration has taken an aggressive stance on fighting antisemitism while also pursuing policies that Jewish communities have historically opposed, including barring immigration.
Bernard, while praising Ahmed’s work, also said JFNA would review its collaboration with him and, “if there’s something there we don’t know about,” would “terminate our relationship.”
The ADL, which has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, has not made any public statement about Ahmed’s case and did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ahmed isn’t bothered by any of this, though he is grateful for the Jewish support he has received. He says he’s received “hundreds of texts” from Jewish supporters, and even spent his first “Jewish Christmas” with some last month, chowing down on Chinese food and watching American football. Despite their years of collaboration, he didn’t expect the big Jewish names to come rushing publicly to his aid.
“I’m not asking anyone else to fight this fight for me,” he said, worried the spectacle will “distract us from the job” of pressuring tech platforms. “They’ve made this about me as a person. And when they can’t defeat the message, they go after the messenger.”
The post He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Rejects Lebanon’s Claim of Hezbollah Disarmament as ‘Insufficient’
Lebanese army members stand on a military vehicle during a Lebanese army media tour, to review the army’s operations in the southern Litani sector, in Alma Al-Shaab, near the border with Israel, southern Lebanon, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher
The Lebanese government announced it has completed the first phase of a US-backed ceasefire plan aimed at disarming the terrorist group Hezbollah and asserting a state monopoly on weapons in the country’s south — a claim rejected by Israeli officials as insufficient.
On Thursday, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) said it had “achieved the objectives of the first phase” of the US-backed deal, which focused on “expanding the army’s operational presence, securing vital areas, and extending operational control” south of the Litani River.
As part of a 2024 ceasefire brokered with Israel, the Lebanese government committed to disarm the Iran-backed terrorist group. Hezbollah has long wielded significant political and military influence across Lebanon while maintaining extensive terrorist infrastructure in the southern part of the country, which borders the Jewish state’s northern region.
Last year, Lebanese officials agreed to the disarmament plan, which called for Hezbollah to be fully disarmed within four months in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from five occupied positions in the country’s southern region.
Israel has continued to hold those five strategic positions south of the Litani River to prevent the terrorist group from rebuilding its military capabilities and rearming near its northern communities.
On Friday, Israeli officials sharply rejected the Lebanese Army’s claim that Hezbollah had been disarmed, warning that the government and military’s efforts, while a cautious first step, fall far short of curbing the Islamist group’s entrenched military power.
“Efforts made toward [disarming Hezbollah] … are an encouraging beginning, but they are far from sufficient, as evidenced by Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm and rebuild its terror infrastructure with Iranian support,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.
According to Israeli intelligence assessments, the terrorist group still possesses hundreds of long-range missiles and thousands of short-range rockets, representing between 10 percent and 20 percent of its pre-war arsenal.
Hezbollah also reportedly maintains more than 1,000 drones and continues expanding its arsenal. While its recruitment falls short of pre-war numbers, the group still reportedly retains over 40,000 terrorists.
“The facts remain that extensive Hezbollah military infrastructure still exists south of the Litani River. The goal of disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon remains far from being achieved,,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a post on X.
“Hezbollah is rearming faster than it is being disarmed,” the statement read.
Despite the statements published today in Lebanon, the facts remain that extensive Hezbollah military infrastructure still exists south of the Litani River. The goal of disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon remains far from being achieved.
This can be seen in the attached… pic.twitter.com/NPTIEbUapQ— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) January 8, 2026
Recent reports indicate that the terrorist group has been actively rebuilding its military capabilities, in violation of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.
With support from Iran, Hezbollah has been intensifying efforts to bolster its military power, including the production and repair of weapons, smuggling of arms and cash through seaports and Syrian routes, recruitment and training, and the use of civilian infrastructure as a base and cover for its operations.
In recent weeks, Israel has conducted strikes targeting Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts, particularly south of the Litani River, where the group’s operatives have historically been most active against the Jewish state.
For years, Israel has demanded that Hezbollah be barred from carrying out activities south of the Litani, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border.
Despite pressure from US and Israeli officials to disarm, the group has repeatedly rejected efforts to relinquish its weapons, even threatening protests and civil unrest if the government tries to assert control over its arsenal.
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Jewish New York State Assembly Candidate Vows Change in Campaign Announcement
Will Sussman, candidate for New York State Assembly 4th District. Photo: Provided by Sussman4NY
Will Sussman, a Jewish civil rights activist and Yeshiva University professor, launched his campaign to become the next assemblyman for New York State’s 4th District in Long Island on Tuesday, promising to address “affordability,” government transparency, and waste caused by the alleged mismanagement of public programs.
In a press release, Sussman’s campaign contrasted his promises with the actions of the 4th District’s current representative in Albany, Rebecca Kassay, whom it described as a “pretend moderate” who once supported far-left Democrats’ initiative to “ban” gas-powered appliances such as stoves, furnaces, and water heaters. New York has already proscribed linking newly constructed buildings to natural gas lines despite its abundance and what energy experts have described as its deflationary effect on energy prices.
Combined with what Sussman called “more regulations” and imprudent “policies,” the radical wing of the Democratic party is making New York uninhabitable, Sussman argued, driving its tax base to other states even as the government promises more services that won’t pay for themselves.
“People aren’t leaving New York because they want to,” Sussman said on Monday. “They’re leaving because Albany has made it impossible to stay.”
He added, “We need an assemblyman who will say ‘no’ to [Gov.] Kathy Hochul and [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani — no to higher taxes, no to bail reform, and no to antisemitism. And we need someone who will shine a light on fraud, waste, and abuse in state government.”
Sussman is making his pitch to the 4th District, located in Long Island’s Suffolk County and including Stony Brook University, backed by a variety of experience which includes teaching, writing columns, and testifying before the US Congress about rising antisemitism on American college campuses.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Sussman was a plaintiff in an explosive lawsuit in June by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner, Sussman and his co-plaintiff Lior Alon alleged that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became inhospitable to Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as pro-Hamas activists there issued calls to “globalize the intifada,” interrupted lessons with “speeches, chants, and screams,” and discharged their bodily fluids on campus properties administered by Jews. Jewish institutions at MIT came under further attack when a pro-Hamas group circulated a “terror-map” on campus which highlighted buildings associated with Jews and Israelis and declared, “Resistance is justified when people are colonized.”
All the while, MIT’s administration allegedly refused to correct the hostile environment.
“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference. Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement announcing the suit. “The very people who are tasked with protecting students are not only failing them, but are the ones attacking them. In order to eradicate hate from campuses, we must hold faculty and the university administration responsible for their participation in — and in this case, their proliferation of — antisemitism and abuse.”
Sussman, who was forced to leave MIT in 2024 and walk away from work he had started in 2017, was himself personally harassed by a professor who “posted a message targeting Sussman by name on his X platform of over 10,000 followers, and another message.”
Policymakers in New York State have sent mixed messages regarding their views on rising antisemitism. While Hochul, a Democrat, recently approved a new Holocaust memorial, a candidate she endorsed, Mamdani, reversed the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism on his first day of office last week and revoked an executive order that opposed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Leading US Jewish groups, including the two main community organizations in New York, rebuked Mamdani for his first steps as mayor.
“Our community will be looking for clear and sustained leadership that demonstrates a serious commitment to confronting antisemitism and ensures that the powers of the mayor’s office are used to promote safety and unity, not to advance divisive efforts such as BDS,” the groups said in a statement. “Singling out Israel for sanctions is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe, and will undermine any words to that effect. Bringing New Yorkers together and building broad coalitions will be foundational to the mayor’s ability to advance a more inclusive New York.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What does Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break with Trump mean for Jews? Nothing good
Since her widely-publicized break with President Donald Trump, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been on a public redemption tour, including with an extended profile in The New York Times — the kind of media source that the far-right firebrand might have shunned for being biased against the right just a few short months ago.
Amid this reputation management tour, a familiar media reflex has kicked in: Pundits have rushed to frame the split between Greene and Trump as a sign of ideological moderation on Greene’s part. Perhaps Greene was “softening,” “repositioning,” or inching toward a more liberal posture. The editor of the center-left anti-Trump publication The Bulwark even declared that Greene’s break with Trump “gives me hope.”
In this telling, any deviation from Trump is assumed to be a move toward the center, or at least away from the hard right. But this framing badly misunderstands both Greene and the political tradition she increasingly represents, with potentially serious consequences for Jews.
Greene is not, in fact, becoming more centrist or less right-wing. Instead, her departure is the most dramatic symptom to date of deepening fractures on the far-right — largely over issues related to Israel, antisemitism and the meaning of nationalism itself.
To understand this, we need to stop thinking of the American right as a single ideological line running from “moderate” to “extreme.”
A political aberration on the right
The contemporary right is a coalition of sometimes incompatible traditions. Trump fused them temporarily, building a coalition of business-friendly Wall Street Republicans; conservative evangelical Christians; conspiracy-minded populists; and a younger, online, nationalist right. But now, after a year of Trump’s final term, the MAGA movement is under greater strain than ever before.
Perhaps the central factor in that strain is Israel.
Trump has loudly embraced Israel, cultivated high-profile Jewish allies, and positioned opposition to a certain kind of left-wing antisemitism associated with pro-Palestinian college student protestors as an essential part of his brand. During his first administration, he moved the United States embassy to Jerusalem, normalized relations between Israel and certain Gulf Arab states, and made support for Israel a litmus test for Republican loyalty.
But the striking philosemitism that characterized Trump’s first term has always coexisted uneasily with his fondness for dog whistles about “globalists” and conspiracy theories about George Soros, and with his early cultivation of a far-right fan base. Still, for a nationalist movement defined by border walls, civilizational rhetoric, and suspicion of cosmopolitan elites, the fact that Jews were rarely at the center of Trump’s list of enemies was rather unusual — in part because the kind of nationalist, closed-border politics Trump embodies has almost always placed Jews at the symbolic center of its animus.
In late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, nationalist antisemitism was not simply a matter of old Christian religious prejudice, or of personal hatred. Rather, it was a cohesive worldview in which Jews were imagined as the antithesis of the nation-state: rootless, transnational, disloyal and corrosive to organic national unity.
In this ideological framework, Jews symbolized border-crossing itself. They were cast as the people who moved too freely, who belonged everywhere and nowhere, who undermined the stable boundaries that nationalism sought to impose.
This is why antisemitism became so tightly enmeshed in nationalist politics. Jews were not hated merely as Jews, but as embodiments of everything against which nationalism defined itself: cosmopolitanism, international finance, liberal universalism, and the erosion of traditional hierarchies. The figure of the Jew in nationalist antisemitic thought was a cipher for the destabilizing forces associated with modernity itself.
From this perspective, Trumpism’s early philosemitism was not the norm. It was the exception.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a different kind of nationalism
Greene has always been different from Trump when it comes to Israel — and to Jews.
Since her election to Congress in 2020, she’s engaged in critiques of U.S. support for Israel and flirtations with antisemitic conspiracy theories. In doing so, she has signaled alignment with a more traditional nationalist logic — one that views Jews, whether in Israel or in the diaspora, as challenges to a purified vision of the nation-state.
She’s not alone. For younger activists on the American right, especially those shaped by online subcultures and post-Iraq War cynicism about an assertive U.S. role in global affairs, Israel has increasingly become seen as a problem, rather than a partner.
In the past three years, the percentage of young Republicans who have a negative image of the state of Israel increased from 35% to 50%, a shockingly rapid change in such a short time. As one young staffer at the Heritage Foundation explained, “Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.” During a recent focus group, one young, extremely online conservative said that Jews are “a force for evil.” These younger far-right voters frame Israel not as a civilizational ally but as a foreign state entangling America in unwanted wars.
And in so doing, they treat American Jewish influence as suspect, recycling old tropes about dual loyalty, financial manipulation and media control.
In November, at a Turning Point USA event, a young conservative activist asked Vice President JD Vance why the U.S. was expending resources on “ethnic cleansing in Gaza” and declared that Judaism “as a religion, openly supports the prosecution of ours.”
Vance did not challenge him. Vance likewise dismissed leaked chats from young Republican leaders praising Adolf Hitler and joking about gas chambers, commenting: “They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like, that’s what kids do”— even though some of these “young Republicans” were in their thirties.
To interpret Greene’s break with Trump as a move toward moderation is to assume that Trump defines the far-right baseline. In reality, Trump has actually moderated certain aspects of far-right politics, even as he radicalized others. His movement was nationalist, but selectively so. It was anti-globalist, but not uniformly antisemitic. It was populist, but protective of certain elites.
Greene represents a faction that wants to resolve these internal contradictions within the MAGA movement. In her worldview, nationalism should be consistent. All foreign aid, including to Israel, is suspect. All international alliances are burdensome. And groups perceived as transnational — whether immigrants, NGOs, or Jews — are inherently destabilizing.
A perilous future
Greene and Trump didn’t fall out over Israel. Instead, the final breaking point appears to have been related to Greene’s demand that Trump’s Justice Department release all of the files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But their rupture over the Epstein files exposed the deeper gap between how Trump understands right-wing nationalism, and how Greene does.
Greene framed Epstein as proof of a corrupt, transnational, globalist elite that must be confronted openly, even if doing so means attacking powerful figures within her own movement. Trump, by contrast, prioritized loyalty, message control and coalition management, treating the issue as a political risk rather than a moral crusade.
In that sense, their fight reflected a clash between grievance-driven, anti-elite populism, and a leader-centered nationalism organized around personal loyalty and strategic discipline.
The reasons behind their rift thus helps to explain why Israel has become a flashpoint.
Support for Israel, and for Jews who advocate for it, increasingly feels incoherent to many on the far-right who share Greene’s populist vision. If nationalism is about defending one’s own people, why privilege another nation’s security over domestic concerns? And if elites are corrupting the nation — so the antisemitic thinking goes — why exempt those associated, whether fairly or not, with global networks?
It is telling that younger right-wing activists increasingly view Trump’s Israel policy as a betrayal rather than a triumph. For them, Trump’s philosemitism looks like an accommodation to donors, evangelicals or geopolitical inertia.
Instead, they hold postures like Greene’s: suspicious of foreign entanglements, hostile to perceived cosmopolitan influence, and willing to revive taboos that Trump temporarily suppressed.
None of this means Greene is destined to lead the Republican Party. But it does suggest she may be closer to the future of Trumpism than Trump himself.
That trajectory should concern anyone committed to pluralism and democratic stability. But it should also sharpen our analytical clarity. Calling Greene more moderate because she breaks with Trump obscures what is actually happening.
The conflict is not between right and center. It is between two versions of the right. One is at least marginally pragmatic, transactional and selectively inclusive. The other is ideological, purist and draws deeply from historical antisemitic tropes.
This is what those Jews who cast their lot in with the Trump administration in the name of policing campus protests failed to understand. It was never going to be possible, in the long term, to build a right-wing nationalist movement that was fine with Jews.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is not an aberration. She is a correction. And if the past is any guide, it is her version of nationalism, not Trump’s historically exceptional philosemitism, that more closely resembles where far-right movements end up.
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