Bari Weiss Accused Trump of Using ‘Anti-Jewish Tropes’ In Resurfaced Interview

Bari Weiss accused President Donald Trump of using “anti-Jewish tropes” and playing a role in the rise of antisemitism in a 2020 interview with Margaret Hoover of PBS.

The interview took place long before Weiss was named CBS News editor-in-chief. In 2020, Weiss was still employed at The New York Times. The recording was dated only a few months before her highly publicized resignation from the publication and her later founding of The Free Press.

In the interview, Hoover prompted Weiss to share her thoughts on Trump.

“I know that you’ve said that you don’t think that President Trump is anti-Semitic, but you’ve also said that anti-Semites and frankly white supremacists find safe harbor in some of his actions and his rhetoric,” said Hoover.

Weiss was quick to clarify that she didn’t believe Trump was wholly absolved of wrongdoing in relation to anti-Semitic rhetoric, calling the distinction between what the president actually believed and the effect of his words “irrelevant.”

“Oh, yeah. When I’ve said Donald Trump isn’t an anti-Semite or whatever I’ve said in the past, what I mean to say is only I don’t know what’s in his heart any more than I know what’s in yours, although I know you, so I do,” she said.

She continued, referencing a clip of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017:

But what I mean to say is it’s sort of irrelevant. What I know is that we have a president who, as my colleague Bret Stephens has perfectly written, he is dismantling the moral guardrails that keep bigotry down. When he talks about the “enemies of the people,” when he talks about “globalists,” there is a reason that anti-Semites, like the people in that clip, are drawn to his banner. He is playing all of the major chords that anti-Semites are drawn to.

And so, you know, and I’ll go further than that. When he says things about the members of The Squad, people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] AOC and Ayanna Pressley, people that I disagree with vehemently on any number of policies, but people who are American, either by birth or by citizenship, and have pledged an oath to uphold the Constitution, when he says of those people that “They need to go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he is playing on one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes, which is this notion of dual loyalty and a provisional belonging.

And so when I, as a Jew, hear him saying that, I hear one of the oldest, most insidious tropes that has led to the mass murder of my people.

Hoover then asked Weiss whether she believed it was “an accident or a coincidence” that violence against Jewish people had risen during Trump’s first term.

“No, of course not,” said Weiss. “He has made things, that were rightly a few years ago unsayable and unacceptable, sayable and acceptable. And that has led, I believe, to a domino effect culturally.

Later in the interview, Weiss claimed that Trump “thinks all of the bad stereotypes about the Jews are true.”

“He just thinks they’re good things,” said Weiss. “He thinks that we’re greedy, that we’re power hungry, that we control the levers of power, all the rest. He thinks they’re good.”

The interview gained renewed attention this week due to the stark contrast between Weiss’s words five years ago and her recent actions as EIC of CBS.

Her controversial decision in December not to air a 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, the maximum security prison in El Salvador that President Trump sent suspected gangsters and illegal immigrants to, was met with widespread outrage, with many accusing her of politically motivated censorship.

On Friday, more contention arose surrounding CBS’ release of the network’s new core values, the fourth of which read: “We love America. And we make no apologies for saying so.”

Watch above via Firing Line with Margaret Hoover.

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