Last week, Trump released an executive order pledging to combat antisemitism by ordering a draconian crackdown on Palestine solidarity protests. That same day, reporters leaked a memo from an agency within Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense ordering personnel to stop marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, along with other calendrical commemorations like MLK Day and Women’s History Month—an early sign of the Defense Secretary’s efforts to implement anti-DEI policies in the military.
The coincidence illustrates the grim contradiction at the heart of MAGA antisemitism: instrumentalizing Jewish safety as an authoritarian weapon with one hand, while the other systematically shreds the fabric of liberal pluralism, which has kept American Jews relatively safe. And in the week since, MAGA has moved quickly towards implementing its crusade against civil rights and dissent across campuses and communities.
Repressing freedom of speech
Trump’s executive order, titled Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism, charges every federal agency to marshal resources to fight antisemitism, which the Right has redefined to include such a wide range of criticism of Israel that it winds up trampling free speech rights in the process.
The EO calls on the Secretaries of State, Education, and Homeland Security to pressure universities to investigate and report the speech of non-citizen students and faculty, and recommends deportation as a possible consequence. An accompanying fact puts it bluntly: “to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”
Proposals to deport pro-Palestine students on foreign visas began circulating on the Right in the aftermath of October 7 and have become a mainstay. In recent months they’ve been championed by a slew of top administration officials like National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, UN ambassador Elise Stefanik and likely DOJ head Pam Bondi, who even suggested US citizens could be deported as well.
Immigration attorney Eric Lee noted the chilling effect of this “unprecedented” measure. “This will impact what students say in class, what they write in essays, what they tell their professors in office hours…It will impact everything down to the poems students write, the songs they sing, the things they say to their friends.” One of the executive orders signed by Trump on his first day in office, the so-called ‘Muslim ban 2.0’, contains a broad clause calling for actions against:
foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including…[those] who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement [of American culture], or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.
The executive order also empowers federal agencies to double down on pre-existing lawfare tactics. It reaffirms, for example, Trump’s 2019 executive order on antisemitism, EO 13899, which adopted the problematic IHRA definition of antisemitism and classified Jews as an ethnic group eligible for enhanced protection under civil rights law. At the time, Israel advocacy groups celebrated the move, which bolstered their attempts to wield Title VI complaints and other lawfare tools to classify criticism of Israel as ethnic discrimination against Jews, and to pressure state and local governments, universities and other bodies to adopt IHRA to restrict criticism of Israel.
Predictably, the weaponization of Title VI complaints and IHRA has skyrocketed since October 7. By charging the Department of Education to pay renewed attention to antisemitism-related Title VI complaints in universities and K-12 settings, Trump’s executive order is a gift to hardline advocates like Kenneth Marcus, who have been calling for these exact measures.
Already, agencies, legislators and activists are springing into action to advance these tactics. This week, the Department of Education launched antisemitism investigations of five universities, while the Justice Department formed a multi-agency task force targeting antisemitism, which will begin with a focus on campuses. A group of bipartisan legislators, meanwhile, reintroduced the Antisemitism Awareness Act to Congress, a bill which would codify the IHRA definition for use by the DoE, and a group of prominent attorneys have launched a new legal center to litigate against antisemitism, housed under the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a major player in Title VI complaints and other modes of lawfare.
New legal strategies
Trump’s executive order also directs the attorney general to use a new legal weapon, US Code Section 241 – Conspiracy against rights, against Palestine solidarity protests. Originally passed by Congress in 1870 to protect the rights of Black Americans in the Reconstruction-era South, 18 U.S.C. 241 was used to prosecute White supremacist violence and attacks on voting rights. Its application gradually expanded during the 20th century until most recently when it was used as part of the federal indictment against Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection.
Casting a broad net, the legal code penalizes concerted activity to deprive individuals of their rights. It remains to be seen how the administration may wield this statute against Palestine solidarity protesters, a tactic encouraged by a Heritage Foundation legal scholar last year. “This incredibly broad, easily abused statute,” tweeted Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “is what they intend to weaponize against anyone who dares voice public support for Palestinian lives/rights.”
And they won’t stop there. In recent years, Hindu nationalists and the fossil fuel industry have replicated repressive tactics honed by Israel’s apologists to attack their own progressive opposition. In its attacks against DEI, MAGA is already working to redefine racial justice as ‘anti-white racism’ and twinning this claim to accusations of antisemitism. Twinning anti-antisemitism with counterterrorism lawfare—which, as the Center for Constitutional Rights detailed in a report, was in many ways forged in anti-Palestinian repression—opens up further chilling possibilities for enhanced repression in an era of deepening Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
Last October the Heritage Foundation released Project Esther, a kind of addendum to Project 2025 calling on the federal government and civil society actors to use a range of immigration, racketeering, civil rights and counterterrorism-related lawfare (in addition to intimidation, surveillance, public relations and other tactics) against the Palestinian-rights movement. It also called for the targeting of “a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal—the destruction of capitalism and democracy.” Fighting antisemitism is a pretext. What the Right really wants is a gloves-off approach to stifling grassroots movements for racial, gender, climate, economic and social justice across the board.
Making Jews less safe
“My promise to Jewish Americans is this,” Trump is quoted as saying, in the executive order’s fact sheet. “With your vote, I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” But if the Trump administration actually wanted to mobilize against the most pressing threats to Jews today, it would start with its own camp.
Just last week Elon Musk drew headlines (if largely wishy-washy ones) for making a Nazi salute and a crude series of Holocaust jokes before addressing the far-right AfD party in Germany, where he joked about Nazi salutes and told the group both that “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that” and that it’s “good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” This was only the latest in Musk’s long history of antisemitic remarks for which he attempted to provide cover by pledging support for Israel, as so many on the Right have done.
The Heritage Foundation task force behind Project Esther is stacked with Christian nationalist groups and leaders who don’t have Jews’ best interests at heart. One participating organization is the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), named in a 2023 report by the legacy Jewish institution B’nai B’rith International which warned against Christian Zionist groups operating with a covert agenda to convert Jews. Another task force leader is Mario Bramnick, a leading Christian Zionist operative who has championed the End Times vision behind his support for Israel: “it’s the regathering…eschatologically, before the coming of the Lord.” In an undated clip circulated by a Jewish anti-missionary organization, Bramnick can be seen speaking at an ICEJ event, calling on Christian Zionists to “embrace our Jewish brethren and tell them about the love of Messiah and the day that we are living in.”
America’s most prominent Christian Zionist, Pastor John Hagee, praised Trump’s executive order, saying of the IHRA definition “one cannot defeat that which they are unwilling to define.” Hagee, for his part, has defined Hitler as a “half-breed Jew” agent sent by God to drive Jews to Israel.
While many American Jewish institutions have spoken out in recent months against these risks to free speech and civil liberties, a vocal minority are eager to join the Right’s crusade. A group called Betar US, which takes its namesake from an early-20th century ultranationalist Jewish youth movement, claims to have used facial recognition technology to generate a database of target students and faculty, and sent lists to immigration and counterterrorism agencies in the Trump administration.
American Jewish communal groups like the Secure Community Network, which focuses on security practices for Jewish institutions, sent a letter to Trump urging deportation. The Anti-Defamation League has not only praised Trump’s executive order, but in its eagerness to work with his administration it has hired a top MAGA-aligned law firm closely connected to newly sworn-in Attorney General Pam Bondi to head its antisemitism policy work.
The MAGA movement’s antisemitism agenda is quite clearly a chilling assault on human rights and free speech. But it’s all the more frustrating and disorienting when Christian nationalists cynically position themselves as defenders of Jews while pursuing policies inimical to the safety and thriving of Jewish communities, along with our friends and neighbors. Most are familiar with the provocative poem attributed to the German Lutheran pastor (and, notably, early supporter of Hitler), Martin Niemöller. Well today, in light of the Trump administration’s antisemitism executive order we might rewrite it: ‘first they came for the pro-Palestinian protesters…’
