Discord and division in Trump’s America
WHEN PRESIDENTIAL power was transferred for the first time in the fledgling United States after the election of 1800, the new president, Thomas Jefferson, sought to embrace his opponents, the Federalists.
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he famously said at his inauguration. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
There were no such conciliatory words at his inauguration in January 2017 from Donald Trump, who had just won a vicious election in which most Americans had voted for somebody else.
In a speech the Los Angeles Times called “pugnacious in tone, pitch black in colour,” the new president essentially continued his discordant election campaign by lambasting the “American carnage” overseen by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” he said. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.” The phrase worried many Jews, in the US and elsewhere, with its unfortunate historical association with the America First Committee, an isolationist movement that opposed US entry into the Second World War, led by aviator Charles Lindbergh and including more than a few pro-Nazis and antisemites in its ranks.
On the other hand, some pointed out that Trump was the first US president with Jewish grandchildren. Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter from his first marriage, and her Orthodox husband Jared Kushner were not just remarkable because they keep a kosher diet and observe Shabbat (although they did ask for rabbinic dispensation several times to allow them to travel with her father). Both were given significant and illdefined roles in government as advisers to the president.
Ivanka used her role as an Defiant: Donald Trump, and (right) son-inlaw Jared Kushner unpaid federal employee to pursue reforms relating to a host of women’s economic issues, including equal pay, greater child tax credits and affordable child-care. Jared, meanwhile, established himself as one of Trump’s closest confidants with a hefty job title — Senior Adviser to the President — to match.
Kushner was granted a swathe of foreign policy responsibilities, including the formidable task of brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He made repeated trips to the Middle East in 2017 but his much-vaunted peace plan had not materialised