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Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left
America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.
While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.
And now, with the release of the latest batch of Epstein files and the start of the Iran War, what was already an epidemic has become a plague. As the Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld has discussed at length, the incoherent rationales for the war have led many to the conclusion (mostly incorrect, in my view, though not without some basis) that America has been pushed into fighting Israel’s war — a view that slides quickly into antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the right and the left, as well as antisemitic ”revenge” attacks by Islamists, Muslims, or other Arabs, like the attempted murders at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last week.
Our communal institutions are failing us. Antisemitism can be found all across the political spectrum, yet as the ADL convenes its annual “Never is Now” conference today, its agenda is and newsfeed are disproportionately focused on the left. Our community needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. And change course.
Almost two-thirds of young conservatives hold antisemitic views
It is shocking to learn how pervasive antisemitic views are among young conservatives, including many working for the government.
A November 2025 study by the conservative Manhattan Institute (not some left-wing org) found that “nearly four in ten in the current GOP (2024 Trump voters plus registered Republicans) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50).” (Interestingly, 77% of Hispanic GOP voters held this view, compared with 30% of white GOP voters.)
In another poll, 64% of young conservatives aged 18-34 agreed with at least one antisemitic statement in a survey. That is absolutely astonishing.
Here’s an even more chilling story. Also last November, Rod Dreher, the post-liberal, far-right conservative thinker, reported on a trip to Washington, D.C. (meeting with Viktor Orban and JD Vance, discussing “the survival of Christianity in Europe”) in his Substack newsletter. After meeting with a number of conservatives in the Trump administration, Dreher wrote:
The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world…. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.
Dreher speculated that a number of factors caused this phenomenon, including the losses of economic opportunity, trust in institutions and “common culture.” He continued:
[T]he issue of antisemitism on the young right is much deeper than I had guessed… [A] lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an antisemite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.
Again, Dreher is not hostile to the right; he is part of it. But what he sees within his own movement shocks him. And this was before the Iran War. Dreher concludes:
The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree…. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil.
I encourage you to read the whole post. I disagree with almost all of Dreher’s ideological positions, but his serious confrontation with this crisis is a model of honest reflection. I would also recommend reading the work of journalist John Ganz, who has written powerfully of the nihilistic, antisemitic Groyper phenomenon and its significance within the GOP.
To be sure, there is antisemitism on the left as well. But there is absolutely no analogue to the scope of right-wing antisemitism and its proximity to power. Here are a few specific examples.
- Kingsley Wilson has served as the Department of Defense press secretary since May 2025. Less than a year prior, she replied to an ADL post commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank that “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a noxious lie that circulates in the antisemitic underbelly of the internet — strong evidence that she spends a lot of time in such spaces. Last March, Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote to Hegseth demanding Wilson’s firing, describing her social media posts as a “minefield of antisemitic rhetoric, white nationalist conspiracies, and pro-Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, Hegseth promoted her.
- Paul Ingrassia, currently acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, had been tapped to lead the Office of General Counsel until Politico exposed comments he made in a group chat including “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” On X (the post has since been deleted), Ingrassia called Fuentes “a real dissident of authoritarianism.”
- Other examples are the often nameless staffers running the social media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other departments. As has now been well documented, these accounts routinely post images and slogans taken from Neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” posted by the Department of Justice, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” posted by DHS, variations of “Which Way Western Man?” (a 1978 book claiming a conspiracy by “World Jewry” against the “Western Man”) and many posts (too many to be coincidence) exactly 14 words long, a probable reference to David Lane’s white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan. (The ADL has a database of such references online.) These are both dogwhistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultra-nationalist swamp.
- And then there are the Young Republican group chats, which somehow keep turning up across the country filled with abject racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. For example, a pile of Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont (once again obtained by Politico) included, among hundreds of lines of abject racism, posts like “I was about to say you’re giving national [leaders] to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest” and various jokes about gas chambers.
And that’s not even including Elon Musk, whatever his statements or hand gestures may mean.
To be clear, there are many Jewish voices on the right who have spoken out, including Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro. So has Trump, who after all has many Jews in his family (even as he often traffics in antisemitic stereotypes about money). But they haven’t made the problem go away, and it’s not at all clear that they even represent the Republican majority anymore. What happens after Trump leaves the political stage?
Meanwhile, other Republican leaders have explicitly rejected calls to isolate or condemn the antisemites. Shapiro, for example, has called out Megyn Kelly for refusing to condemn Fuentes and Owens. And when conservative pundit Scott Jennings asked Vice President Vance, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” he replied, “No it doesn’t, Scott.” While Vance did also say “I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” that is a toothless statement if he refuses to take any action against those who express it.
So, they remain in office. Carlson, meanwhile, remains welcome at leading conservative institutions like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, despite a long torrent of antisemitic rhetoric, most recently blaming Chabad Lubavitch for the Iran war, which would be merely ludicrous were it not also exceedingly dangerous. (For good measure, Carlson has recently platformed not only Holocaust deniers but 9/11 “Truthers” who say that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks.)
Antisemitism is intrinsic to right-wing nationalism
This isn’t just a matter of a few bad apples. This is a massive, systemic trend. It is part of the rise of ethno-nationalism, Christian Nationalism, National Conservatism and the triumph of Pat-Buchanan-style America First politics. Despite the efforts of people like Loomer and Shapiro, and prominent Jewish NatCons like Yoram Hazony, it is impossible to somehow surgically remove antisemitism from that politics while leaving the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and racist strands in place — as Hazony appears to have recently found out. (“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he said at this year’s NatCon conference. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”)
Antisemitism is not incidental to the nationalistic worldview that is ascendent in the Republican Party; it is essential to it. As Ilya Somin recently wrote in the Unpopulist newsletter:
Nationalism doesn’t just historically correlate with bigotry — it consistently drives antisemitism and other racial and ethnic prejudices. Indeed, nationalism intensifies preexisting antisemitic impulses. To the degree that today’s conservatives decide to embrace — or even just make peace with — nationalism and dispense with the universalist liberal principles of the American Founding, they will find it difficult to impossible to stem the spread of antisemitism in their midst.
Antisemitism is also an integral part of the right-wing internet. The most popular podcaster of all, Joe Rogan, recently hosted conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, a vicious antisemite who, according to reporting in this publication, “wrote last year that the U.S. was ‘controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism’ and claimed Jews control the media; and said that Israel had manipulated the Holocaust for its own gain.” (He also platformed Jake Shields, an MMA fighter-turned-far-right commentator who had said the previous month when he was on the show that Jews control America.)
And Rogan is just the tip of the spear. Andrew Tate routinely spouts antisemitic rhetoric with no corollary anywhere on the left. Influencer Nick Shirley just posted supportively of an antisemitic video by fellow influencer Tyler Oliveira. Right-wing conspiratorial antisemitism is taken for granted in the looksmaxxing and incel worlds. The Great Replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us!”) is routinely embraced on right-wing news media channels. Unambiguous, full-throated right-wing antisemitism is just part of the vibe.
But the ADL has been too busy worrying about Zohran Mamdani’s wife’s political views.
How is this happening?
Why, with an entire Jewish communal infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism, are we failing to focus on the most troubling manifestations of the crisis? Why are our legacy organizations getting it so wrong?
There are several answers to those questions.
The first is obvious: hardline pro-Israel donors have distorted organizational priorities, directing resources and attention to what offends them personally, rather than what poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety. Their motivations may be sincere; clearly many organizational leaders are sincerely dismayed by anti-Zionism, and due to their own emotional connections to Israel and Zionism, they may sincerely experience it as antisemitism. But now, much of the Jewish establishment has concluded that harsh criticisms of Israel, and certainly anti-Zionist ones, are not wrongheaded political views but expressions of antisemitic bigotry. And that has warped organizational priorities and resource allocation decisions.
Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left: It does. And, of course, there is antisemitic violence perpetrated by anti-Zionists motivated by animus toward the State of Israel; we have seen that this week. But the overwhelming majority of that violence is committed by Islamists and terrorists, not campus protesters or obnoxious writers, artists and publishers. Yet the Jewish Establishment continues to paint with a broad brush, lumping together activists with principled objections to Zionism (as they understand or misunderstand it) with murderers and bigots targeting Jews with violence. There is no left-wing equivalent of the world Dreher describes, or the candidacy of James Fishback in Florida, or the popularity of Joe Rogan. And, love him or hate him, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly, vociferously condemns antisemitism even as he holds views on Israel that are well to the left of many American Jews.
Second, obviously, many of the leading donors to Jewish establishment organizations are either Republicans themselves, or so strongly supportive of the Netanyahu government that they would prefer to trade the American Jewish birthright for the porridge of Greater Israel. Yes, they might concede, right-wing antisemitism is a problem, but plenty of Republicans are against it and the benefits of aligning with the Trump regime – for Israel, for their conservative moral values, or for their own pocketbooks — outweigh the costs.
Whether that is correct or not is impossible to say. But I would suggest, broadly speaking, that ethno-nationalism rarely turns out well for the Jews. The neocons and fiscal conservatives are not in charge anymore, and the MAGA movement’s nationalist-antisemitic monster cannot be contained once it is unleashed. As I fear that today’s coddlers of the party’s antisemitic wing will, one day, look as misguided as those who minimized the threat of nationalists in the past.
It’s also clear that some of our leaders (mostly Boomers or Gen-Xers) are often simply clueless about online culture. They seem not to even know the language. They may now know what a groyper is. But how about goyslop? Agartha? “Noticing”? 14:88? Have these donors ever been on Discord? Scrolled through TikTok? Watched Joe Rogan? Seen what happens to your YouTube feed when you watch a single video featuring conspiratorial content or a manosphere influencer?
Antisemitism is everywhere online, abetted by social media algorithms that are somehow immune to regulation. And if you don’t believe that matters, consider how Gamergate, Pepe the Frog, QAnon, and other online content moved into the mainstream and helped put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now imagine that happening with a figure who is closer to Fuentes or Fishback than Trump.
Of course, the ADL as an organization is aware of these phenomena; I’ve cited their own work several times in this article. But if you browse through the speakers at “Never is Now,” or peruse the ADL’s recent press releases, you will quickly see that the threat from the right is given far less prominence than the threat (real and perceived) from the left. The institutional knowledge is there, but the institutional priorities are disordered.
Worst of all, not only is the Antisemitism Industrial Complex failing to focus on the most dangerous forms of antisemitism, many of its efforts are making matters worse — including in the last few weeks.
First, by counting all anti-Zionist protests as antisemitic incidents, the ADL has destroyed its credibility as an objective monitor of antisemitism, making it much harder to track; we no longer have reliable data.
Second, by terrifying thousands, perhaps millions, of Jewish people — including many friends of mine — this emphasis on left-wing antisemitism obscures the more serious threats from white nationalists, Islamists, terrorists, and others who commit acts of violence.
And third, the Jewish establishment has imposed a hyper-woke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestine, or in opposition to Israel, or in opposition to Israel’s role in the Iran War, are deemed to be bigotry that merits permanent cancellation. (I have experienced this myself as well.) As Dreher noted, this only makes matters worse, as both conservatives and progressives can see that political speech is being censored by Jewish elites with significant political power — which is exactly what their antisemitic conspiracy theories tell them.
Obviously, it is not the case that if the Jewish community were to do or say a certain thing, antisemitism would disappear. Bigotry never disappears. But the question is not a binary one of existence or non-existence, but one of scope, size, and proximity to power. By way of analogy, racism will also probably never disappear, but when abject racism is espoused by government officials and leading cultural figures, that is measurably worse than when it is consigned to the margins. And that is precisely what has happened with antisemitism.
The anti-antisemitism world has become an echo chamber obsessed with left-wing anti-Zionism, while nationalist antisemitism is now widespread among young Republican activists and online influencers. I only hope our leaders change course before it is too late.
The post Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.
