Tablet, one of the myriad online publications oriented towards Jewish audiences and interests, is All Things Trump these days.
In “Who Are Trump’s Alt-Right Supporters?”, Armin Rosen writes:
Among the many bizarre quirks of this presidential election is the fact that the case for Donald Trump is hardly ever made in print by people who actually agree with him. There have been numerous attempts at understanding the grievances and overall logic of Donald Trump’s supporters, but they’ve been the work of journalists who would never consider voting for the man. Take, for example, Tablet columnist James Kirchick’s recent reporting for the National Review on “white identitarian” support for Trump, or Slate’s Reihan Salam, who exhaustively explored the socio-economic unperpinnings of the real estate developer’s populist appeal…
Because few mainstream opinion-makers back Trump, the pro-Trump position has largely been treated as a puzzle for the rest of the media and polite society to unpack on their own. Which is why Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s article, An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right, published earlier this week Breitbart, is one of the election’s most important if occasionally terrifying documents…
There are plenty of valid criticisms one could level against Bokhari and Yiannopoulos: The piece soft-pedals the racial rhetoric common on sites like VDARE and Taki’s Magazine…
Even so, the article, which is written in the elevated language of ideas and legitimate political discourse, is important for decoding the Trumpist phenomenon. And there aren’t exactly a lot of other articles like that out there! Before the Bokhari-Yiannopoulos opus, all you really had to go on as far as compelling Trumpist or quasi-Trumpest elucidations of Trumpism went was The Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson’s apologia in Politico this past January. Trumpism may be an ugly and un-self-conscious worldview. But as Bokhari, Yiannopoulos, and Carlson have invaluably reminded us, it’s a worldview nonetheless, and one that’s on the cusp of getting a major American political party’s reluctant stamp of approval.
Meanwhile, in his piece “Fritz Kuhn’s Celebrity Apprentice”, Arnie Bernstein tells us that “Donald Trump is not Hitler. He’s more like the leader of the German-American Bund.” Well, okay, then.
It was a political moment unprecedented in American history. A charismatic leader took the stage in an arena packed to the rafters with fanatical supporters and delivered a rousing and most assuredly politically incorrect speech decrying the United States’ “suicidal tolerance of parasitical aliens, making something entirely different out of the nation, destroying its ethics, morals, patriotism, and religious conceptions.” He told his devoted audience to pledge their loyalty to him and their desires for a greater America. In the media gallery, a reporter was forcibly removed as she openly mocked the speaker. A wild-eyed protester rushed the stage but was stopped by a steady rain of fists administered to his head and torso as the crowd roared its approval.
Another day, another Trump campaign event? No, this was the Feb. 20, 1939, gathering of the German-American Bund, a Depression-era pro-Hitler organization, at their “Washington’s Birthday Rally” in Madison Square Garden. A packed house of 20,000 plus whooped it up the Bundist leader Fritz Kuhn, a man with vainglorious dreams who roused crowds by targeting perceived religious, racial, ethnic, and/or political enemies…
