SUNN Post Exclusive
Donald Trump’s strongest financial support has come, not surprisingly, from the communities he represents and defends: the uber-rich, white Christians, and, perhaps the most controversial, the Jewish community. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has been open and even boisterous about his support for American Jews and the State of Israel. He garnered nearly 40% of Jewish votes in 2024, a noticeable improvement from his 2020 campaign when he earned only 30%. Prosperous Jewish donors poured vast sums into his recent presidential campaign, including Miriam Adelson who, alone, donated $100 million.
But already there’s a growing divide among Jews for and against Trump in his early months in office, a time when critics have repeatedly compared him to Adolf Hitler and he’s made good on his promises to enact unforgiving immigration policies — an issue close to home for a Jewish community steeped in displacement.
As a high school junior who was raised in a modern Orthodox synagogue and now attends a school predominantly left-leaning, I see two different sides of the Jewish community coming into stark opposition: the side that sees Trump as a true ally, someone who has seen and advocated for them, and the side that finds his policies abhorrent and condemns his shift towards authoritarianism.
How do we, as the rising generation of Jews, navigate this steep divide? How can we make sense of the president’s words of friendship and allegiance, which seem in sharp contrast to his troubling actions? And what if we get it wrong?
There is no answer in bold Sharpie to find in the scrawl. But we can start by looking for answers in the Torah, our guiding moral manual. In its passages, we can hold Trump accountable and start to make sense of his real relationship with Jewish principles.
While speaking to a group of Jewish donors and an Israeli-American council in D.C., Trump made clear his promises to American Jews.
“I will be your defender, your protector,” he said, “and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.”
His unapologetic allegiance to American Jews was a common theme in both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and it only grew louder as he sought the Jewish vote in 2024. The Republican Jewish Coalition, an organization who endorsed Trump throughout his 2016 candidacy, even hosted him at the Presidential Forums to highlight his support.
In 2024, he headlined the same coalition’s annual leadership summit to discuss issues concerning the Hamas-led October 7th attacks and the difference between his approach to Israel and Kamala Harris’. He referred to himself as “the second coming of God” and insisted, “no president has done more for Israel than I have.”
Trump has permeated many Jewish-American groups’ hearts and, even more so, their wallets, with America’s pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, donating more than $200 million to Trump’s campaign since 2020.
Trump has delivered on some of his promises. On March 2, the Trump administration sent another $4 billion in military aid to Israel. His unbridled support for Israel has been apparent since 2016, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016 lauded Trump as a “true friend” to his nation. This week, Netanyahu thanked Trump again, and said the new funding would help to “finish the job” in the region.
But while Trump’s sway over the U.S. bank account conveys his unconditional financial support, the so-called ally of the Jewish people has been contradicting and trampling over several vital rules that the Torah commands us to obey.
Leviticus 19:18 reads “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” — a core principle of Judaism. Through it sprouts the idea of empathy and compassion, welcoming the stranger and donating to charity.
Donald Trump is not as hospitable as the Torah wants us to be. Instead, he announced in 2015 he’d be attempting a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims immigrating to the United States, a promise he kept. He has referred to immigrants as the “enemy” of America and promised that, with the halting of new immigration, the “restoration” of the United States will begin — not quite the hospitality of Leviticus 19:34, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.”
For Jews, the clear opposition to our values should be enough of a warning sign: Trump is a friend neither to the world nor to our community.
And furthermore, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians feels looming and impossible, watching the man occupying the Oval Office advocate for the mass expulsion of the Palestinians to turn Gaza into a resort should serve as an ample warning. Even though his administration has since walked back some of his comments, Trump had the audacity to re-post an AI-created video realizing his promise.
This is not keeping to the Torah I grew up on. Trump’s forte is bullying the weak, the defeated, and if, one day, Israel finds itself in such a position, we should not be naive to think he won’t turn on us just like he has so many other minorities.
Exodus 20:12 forbids lying: “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” It’s a grave sin to knowingly tell a lie, a sin that Trump has practiced repeatedly.
During a presidential debate, the then-nominee for the Republican party claimed falsely that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating” the dogs and cats in their neighborhood.
Later, as tragedy hit our West Coast, Trump claimed that the Los Angeles wildfires were linked to the states’ protection of a fish species, even though experts have found no evidence of the connection and have repeatedly debunked the claim. He has offered seemingly random numbers regarding the autism spike, brewing baseless fear, and he has defended the attackers of the January 6th riot on the Capitol, claiming that “they didn’t assault” anyone, even after photographic evidence and courts proved otherwise.
I try to abide by the Jewish commandments in my day-to-day life. Some of them are easy: Don’t murder, and don’t steal. Others are harder: Don’t gossip, and don’t be jealous. But challenging or not, I make an effort to incorporate our teachings into the ultra-modern life I live alongside everyone else.
When I see Trump proudly declare himself the number one supporter of Jewish Americans, it seems comical at best. He breaks among the more vital instructions of the whole religion, and he does it in the same breath as proclaiming his allegiance.
You cannot be pro-Jew and anti-Torah. As Jews, we have an obligation to the poor, the orphans, the widows. When our president brags about separating families at the border, that should come across as a direct violation of our responsibilities. When Trump refers to migrants as “poisoning the blood” of America, we must allow ourselves to see the obvious: we’ve been called that, too.
Donald Trump can declare that he is an ally to the Jews until he is blue in the face, but the verses in our holy scripture dispute him. The question we must ask ourselves is clear: Who do we trust more, the 47th president of the United States or the Torah?