The Monster They Imagined
For over a millennium, antisemitism has thrived on grotesque fabrications — a conspiracy theory with no authors, accusing a people with no crime. Jews have been portrayed, in different times and places, as shadowy manipulators of power, hoarders of wealth, global puppet masters, and even sadistic child murderers. These lies, devoid of evidence and rooted in fear and envy, fueled pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, and ultimately genocide.
What’s striking, in the eerie mirror of modern American politics, is how these very tropes — long used to justify persecution of an innocent people — now find something resembling flesh in the form of Donald J. Trump. Not as a Jew, of course, but as the embodiment of those phantasmal accusations, made real in the actions and ambitions of a single man.
Trump, a man of immense inherited wealth, has flaunted that fortune while refusing transparency, skirting taxes, and using his position to enrich himself. Where Jews were falsely accused of controlling the press or banking, Trump has actively tried to co-opt the Justice Department, weaponize the IRS, and install loyalists at every level of power — not through secret cabals, but through brazen public acts. He has attempted to delegitimize elections, demanded personal loyalty from officials sworn to the Constitution, and encouraged violence from his base — a demagogue openly courting authoritarianism.
Perhaps most disturbingly, where the blood libel myth falsely claimed Jews murdered Christian children, real-world violence often destroyed Jewish families — including children — as collateral in waves of collective punishment. Trump, by contrast, has demonstrated indifference to the lives of actual children: jailing them at the border, ignoring climate threats, and supporting policies that tolerate mass death by gunfire in schools. These aren’t hallucinations. They’re documented.
This isn’t a moral inversion or an act of rhetorical vengeance. It’s a bitter historical irony. Trump is not what Jews are; he’s what antisemitism imagined them to be, and in that tragic irony lies a warning: those who weaponize myths may one day get their monster, not in the people they feared but in the leaders they adoringly follow.