Donald Trump—yes, I’m aware this is a column for a Canadian publication—has been in office this second time around just long enough that I think I’ve gotten a grasp on his approach.
The returning POTUS likes to take a not-altogether-unreasonable stance, or even a thoroughly reasonable one, and use it as the pretext to wrecking-ball whichever aspect of functioning American democracy. The switch from plastic to paper straws was yes probably a bit silly in the grand scheme of things? Time to abandon environmental protections generally. COVID vaccines can have very unpleasant side effects that their most enthusiastic proponents would sometimes elide? Time to stop vaccinating for measles in America and to shut down public health assistance internationally. Things of this nature keep happening.
Perhaps it’s due to the happenstance fact of my being a Jewish woman that I am particularly aware of the way that Trump is using feminism and anti-antisemitism in his now-classic pretextual manner.
The women thing: Because clearly there could be no other concerns for women generally, Trump has taken an oh-so-noble stand against transgender women playing women’s sports or being housed in women’s prisons. He’s rather plainly doing so in lieu of being good for women, on a policy level or that of such things as style, affect, or choice of vice president. In the midst of what was widely and accurately perceived as a revenge-of-men moment, Trump stopped and offered a little something for the ladies, in the form of one small (not so small if you are trans) symbolic measure that yes many women wanted but many didn’t want it and even those who did almost certainly had bigger concerns.
And now, ostensibly in the name of defending Jewish Americans against our enemies (I say “our” because I’m a dual citizen; I am getting to the relevance of this), Trump’s defunding higher education. Into the toilet goeth the great American research institutions. And because why not, immigration officials from his administration have arrested a green-card-holding Palestinian Columbia University graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, for his role in the Columbia encampments.
For the most part, Jewish opinion on Trump’s Columbian gambit is split on ideological lines. I keep seeing sentiments along the lines of, you should oppose what he’s doing regardless of how you felt about the encampments, coming from people who yeah very much did support the encampments. And I’ve seen anti-encampments sorts saying that sure Trump is doing a lot of damaging things as well, but let’s at least give him this.
Well. I’m here as a Jew who extremely did not support the encampments to say that what Trump is now doing ‘for’ Jews is terrible generally and for us specifically. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy that starts to make sense as such when you remember that Jewish Americans are overwhelmingly Democrats, who voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Even if you acknowledge all the left antisemitism on campus, inside seminar rooms and beyond, it’s outrageous to think that destroying higher ed is good-for-the-Jews.
And even if you think as I do that the way the encampments played out for Jewish students made a mockery of the promise campuses these days make of protecting students from microaggressions and casual discrimination, even if you think they did their own part to damage the credibility of American and not just American higher ed, before Trump got his mitts on any of this, even then, the willy-nilly removal of green cards sets a dangerous precedent.
A dangerous precedent, but also, there is now an anti-Trump martyr in the form of Khalil, a hero now for his fight against Trump and ‘The Jews.’ This even though The Jews did not ask for this.
***
I became a Canadian citizen in September 2023. Then… well, we all know what then. While Oct. 7 of course did not happen in Canada, there was this skyrocketing of shall we say intense antizionism in Toronto, at levels exceeding what was out there in my hometown of New York City, Columbia campus notwithstanding. Had I, to borrow from the classic immigration-themed scene on Seinfeld, gone from a pony country to a non-pony country?
If you had told me that it would be March 2025, and I’d be contemplating hanging a gargantuan Canadian flag from my home, I’d have been let’s say more than a bit confused, and would have needed you to fill in a lot of blanks. I’d have been confused if you’d told me this as recently as November 2024. No, I was not pleased with the U.S. election result, but Trump 1.0 had not led to the end of American democracy, let alone had major implications for Canada.
It is my belief that the Trump administration is completely serious about wanting to annex Canada. I have thought this since Donald Trump started with his cracks about a 51st State. Was it the imaginary Canadian fentanyl imports that tipped me off? It was not not that.
Now, I’m not here to prognosticate about whether Trump will get to the point of trying anything militarily, let alone whether he could take us, as in, whether in this hypothetical war that it yes seems premature to get worked up about what with all the world’s actual wars, America wins.
But do I think Trump would like to turn Canada into Trump Canada, gilded Trump logos on all its monuments? Of course he would. Of course property in colder places will become more valuable with climate change. Of course he wants whichever natural resources for America or for himself. But that isn’t even most of it.
I believe that Trump is at the end of the day a simple man, and that he saw a map where the (contiguous) continental United States and Alaska are broken up by this other thing, and wouldn’t it look pretty—wouldn’t it be HUGE—if it were all Trump’s to play with?
So if you’re looking at Trump as a Jewish Canadian, looking longingly at how at least he is taking antisemitism seriously, I would suggest taking a wider view at his pretext project.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
