Trump's Nazi problem

Do not belong to the “Hitler sucks” wing of the US Republicans: the influencer Dan Bilzerian, the podcaster Tucker Carlson, the politician James Fishback, the podcaster Nick Fuentes (from left to right) in front of the fictional Kekistan flag

Jefferson County, West Virginia. The right-wing camp in the USA is divided. In December last year, the right-wing conservative US think tank Manhattan Institute published the results of a survey on the membership structure of the Republican Party. What was striking in the results of the survey were the differences between young and old, especially when it came to the topic of anti-Semitism.

When asked whether they expressed anti-Semitic opinions openly and unbiasedly, four percent of Republicans over 50 fully or partially agreed with the statement. By contrast, as many as 25 percent of Republicans under age 50 expressed approval. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that 37 percent of all Republicans fully or partially agreed with the statement "The Holocaust of Jews in Nazi Germany was greatly exaggerated or did not occur as historians describe it." For men under 50, the figure was as high as 54 percent.

37 percent of all Republicans fully or partially agreed with statements that relativized or denied the Holocaust, and among men under 50 the figure was as high as 54 percent.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, there is a deep divide within a party that is radicalizing under the leadership of US President Donald Trump, and to some extent it runs between generations. The recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham even explicitly attributed himself to a “Hitler-sucks wing of the Republican Party,” which raises questions about the other wing. Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, an independent organization that analyzes the spread of harmful online content, told Jungle World: "In recent years, countless fissures have emerged within the Republican Party's support base, and anti-Semitism is among the deepest of these fissures." This is particularly true among the younger generation, "and it doesn't seem to me that the leadership of the GOP (Grand Old Party; nickname of the Republican Party; editor's note) really knows what they are doing should do to address this."

The division is perhaps most evident when it comes to Israel. On the one hand, there are Christian conservatives – including so-called Christian nationalists – who often portray themselves as philo-Semites and defenders of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” also to distance themselves from Muslims. For religious and political reasons, quite a few of them believe that all Jews around the world should "return" to Israel to fulfill Old Testament prophecies.

The US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee – a Baptist preacher and former governor of the US state of Arkansas – is a good example of this group. In an interview last February with right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Huckabee said of Israel, "It would be fine if it took everything," referring broadly to all of the land between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq. He justified his view with references to passages from the Bible. He also said that Israel had no intention of doing so, but that it "would at least like to take the land that it currently owns."

It is doubtful whether many of the Republican Party's pro-Israel "philo-Semites" care about the well-being of Jews or whether they view them as mere pawns in a grand eschatological game.

Perhaps even more extreme are the views of preacher John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States, which claims ten million members. But Hagee also includes Hitler in his kind of healing events and has already claimed that Hitler was a "hunter" sent by God who, with the help of the Holocaust, made God's will possible in the form of the founding of the modern Israeli state. Given these instrumentalizing attitudes, which are based on fundamentalist readings of the Bible, it is doubtful whether many of these pro-Israel “philo-Semites” in the Republican Party are interested in the well-being of Jews or whether they view them as mere pawns in a grand eschatological game.

The current Republican opponents of Israel and anti-Semites often see themselves as different from the aforementioned protagonists. The right-wing populist former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, for example, described the right-wing Jewish radio host Mark Levin as a “Tel Aviv Levin” and criticized him as the “town crier of the Netanyahu regime.” Once an advocate for Israel, Bannon now says his views have changed because he takes Trump's "America First" slogan seriously. For him, Israel is not a US ally, but rather "a protectorate, a vassal" that should behave accordingly.

A few months before the interview with Mike Huckabee, last October, Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, probably the most famous anti-Semite in the USA, to his show. Kevin Roberts, president of the influential right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, which published the infamous right-wing authoritarian strategy paper "Project 2025," defended Carlson's interview with Fuentes against critics. Other conservatives then immediately criticized Roberts himself harshly (Jungle World 46/2025). The Heritage Working Group on Anti-Semitism, created after October 7, 2023, stopped working with the think tank after the incident, staff resigned and donors stopped supporting. A senior Heritage official told CNN: "It's open insurrection, it's disgust," and 85 percent of Heritage employees were "completely disgusted" by Roberts' statements.

But another employee warned in an internal chat leaked to the tabloid New York Post: "After talking to some of the interns, I think there is a growing number of them who really agree with Fuentes." According to an investigative report in the New York Times newspaper in July, the think tank allowed many young, especially male, employees at the think tank to support Fuentes, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or deny the Holocaust.

Bilzerian released an AI campaign video five days before his primary election in which he portrayed his Jewish rival with horns, referred to Jews as "Satan's creepy little minions" and praised Hitler

This is now also reflected in the party’s primaries. In the US state of Florida, two openly anti-Semitic primary candidates achieved remarkable results in August. Dan Bilzerian received 19 percent of the vote in a primary for a U.S. House seat and James Fishback received 10.5 percent in his bid to become the Republican gubernatorial candidate—poor results for U.S. primaries, but major successes given the frequency with which both used blatantly racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Fishback is a “Groyper”, i.e. a supporter of Fuentes. He insulted his black competitor in the gubernatorial primary as “chimpanzees” and “slaves.” He also frequently used terms like “goyslop,” a portmanteau of “goy,” which means “non-Jew” in Yiddish, and “slop,” which means trash in English and is now mostly used to describe poorly made AI content. The word “goy” is often used by neo-Nazis when they fantasize about the masses of people oppressed by Jews.

The misogynistic influencer Bilzerian, on the other hand, has over 40 million followers on social media. He released an AI campaign video five days before his primary election in which he portrayed his Jewish rival with horns, called Jews "Satan's creepy little minions" and praised Hitler. He responded to the criticism by rejecting the word anti-Semitism because, as he put it, “Palestinians are the true Semites.”

Also running in Florida was Marshall Rawson, a participant in the 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a long-time member of the now-defunct right-wing extremist group League of the South (LOTS). Rawson won his primary for a Florida House seat. Although he was not as openly racist or anti-Semitic during the election campaign as Bilzerian or Fishback, he defended his former membership in the organization. LOTS was a decidedly racist and anti-Semitic group whose leader had been propagating a variant of the “Great Exchange” conspiracy theory since 2015 at the latest. In 2015, he claimed that “the organized Jew,” whose “baseness should never be underestimated,” was using “various people from the Third World” as weapons against whites. No polling data has yet been released for Rawson's campaign against his Democratic rival, but his constituency is extremely conservative. So he has a good chance of getting into the state parliament.