Fighting back in Trump’s new world

DR: What’s it like in America under Trump Mark 2?

MF: Overwhelming. Every day there’s some new horror. You can’t keep up with it. People are overwhelmed. Their energy is just squashed. They don’t know where to start. Steve Bannon said, the first time round, “Throw 100 things at them, and maybe they’ll intercept two or three”. That’s what it is, every day, on every front, all going on at the same time. And it’s unrestrained this time. The people around Trump, who hedged him a little the first time, are all gone. Now, they are all enablers, facilitators, “yes-men”. There’s nobody saying “No!”. The gloves are off. It’s complete open warfare on whatever liberal state was left in this country.

DR: How united are these enablers, or do they have different interests?

MF: Elon Musk peeled off because he had a divergence of interest with Trump over tariffs and public spending, so some cracks are there, but they tend not to show it publicly until it reaches that kind of breaking point. Mostly they’re just echoing whatever he says, like Marco Rubio, or certainly, JD Vance, and most of the Cabinet Ministers, too.

DR: The first time round, he had people like Bannon also setting the agenda to some extent. Is this time different? Is it Trump making the agenda?

MF: I don’t think he’s smart enough to make an agenda. He’s pretty much, point by point, enacting Project 2025. He claimed not to even know what it was when he was running, but he’s doing it. This is something the political right has been hatching for 30 years. It’s a consolidation, a systematic programme, from hollowing out the public sector to attacking unions across the board; just authoritarianism at every turn. A full-on assault.

DR: Is that driven by an economic view that will keep certain people rich and other people not?

MF: It’s complicated. His tariffs actually pissed off the capitalist class because the Wall Street Journal, that “liberal bastion”, was pushing back, saying, “Don’t do this, you’re going to sink the economy.” That’s the Wall Street Journal, not some crazy socialist! On the other hand, he came in promising higher taxes on the wealthiest. This budget that’s going through is exactly opposite: tax cuts for the wealthiest and stripping federal programmes. Poverty programmes. There’s a tax increase on the poor and a tax cut for the rich. Bottom line: the billionaires are happy.

DR: What about some of the people he has empowered? Who should we be especially concerned about?

MF: I’m especially concerned about Vance. He’s waiting in the wings. If Trump doesn’t make it through this term, or even if he does, Vance will be the incumbent. He’s Trump, but clever and shrewd, not so spur of the moment, random, chaotic. He’s an independent maverick. He wrote a book some years ago called Hillbilly Elegy, which gave his credentials as white working class, rural. He went to Yale! He’s a Yale lawyer. He’s not some working class Joe from the sticks, as much as he wants to put that one over on people, and he’s drifted hard right. He was once a very strong critic of Trump. He called Trump a Nazi. Now he’s Vice President under Trump.

DR: How have people in the Jewish community reacted to Trump’s  re-election?

MF: To his general social agenda? With disgust and loathing – 80% of the Jewish community voted against him. But he has been incredibly good at weaponising antisemitism, splitting the Jewish community and using that to target domestic opposition. it’s worked like a charm. Even people who should know better in the Jewish community fall in with that one, because there have been a few high profile antisemitic attacks that drive the fear and worry. And then sure, like, “Oh, he’s going to handle antisemitism? Great.” They like that.

DR: What is the “Jewish community” in the US today?

MF: The official institutions are represented by the wealthiest, the furthest to the right. They’re not representative. They’re not elected. There’s no internal democracy in the organised Jewish community. But you’ve got this interesting generational divide, mostly around Palestine, of Jews that didn’t grow up with that narrative. They’re thinking it through themselves, and coming up in a very different place.

DR: Is it just the younger generation who have radical politics? Aren’t movements like If Not Now, and Bend the Arc more multigenerational?

MF: There are older veterans but the ones speaking most clearly on Palestine are all younger generation people. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and others that have really been in the fray about Israel, Palestine and Gaza are driven by younger activists.

DR: The Jewish Bloc here in London has people from their 20s to their 80s marching together.

MF: We’ve got that, too. but the older generation are more marginal. The youth are the up-and-coming, and at some point will overtake. There’s a lot  of energy there from people who have realised at a young age that they’ve been lied to.

DR: How much interweaving is there between those groups? Does JVP work with people from If Not Now?

MF: Not enough. You’ve got the double whammy – Jewish factionalism and left factionalism!

DR: Where do you fit in personally?

MF: I’m still a proud member of Democratic Socialists of America. That’s my broad political framework. I work with a lot of Jewish left organisations. But my politics do not, mainly, go to identity politics. It’s a balance of how much I go there, and how much I go to a broad economic justice agenda that is not specific to any particular identity interest.

DR: And where do Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) fit into this? How outspoken are they around Palestine?

MF: Unfortunately, I think too much, because their focus really was domestic, municipal. To the extent they go to Palestine, they lose a lot of that support. There are other organisations to do Palestine. There’s no other groups doing that Jewish left domestic agenda. So why lose that focus? The Jewish establishment are falling in behind Trump and closing ranks. Trump, Netanyahu. It’s gotten worse, not better. The internal policing, the Macarthyism has ratcheted out of control.

DR: I’ve seen reports about their reaction to campus activity, denouncing it as antisemitism.

MF:  Half of those students out for Palestine on the campuses are Jews!

DR: It’s similar here. Our Jewish establishment claims, “London is a no-go area for Jews”. Yet  every national Palestine march includes hundreds, sometimes more than 1,000 Jews. What about other US minorities? Is there a similar political split between their establishments and grassroots activists?

MF: Trump was horrifyingly successful in peeling off segments of all communities to get votes. I still can’t fathom it. Black votes for Trump.

DR: Higher this time around?

MF: Significantly – triple really.

DR: I know that the Jewish vote against Trump first time round was higher than the Latino vote against him. Was that true this time?

MF: Yes. He tapped people’s misogyny: “We can’t have a woman as president.” The whole Big Man/ successful businessman image. Complete bullshit, but that’s what he projected. 

DR: Were people shocked when they found that Trump had got in again? Leftists in Britain certainly sensed that his campaign had momentum.

MF:  I was shocked. I was helping the Harris campaign. It’s not my politics, but I sure as hell didn’t want Trump in. I guess I was in my own echo chamber. We thought: people know what Trump’s about, who’s going to give him a second term? And half the country gave him a second term!

DR:  Who has most to fear and who has most to lose from a Trump Presidency?

MF: Probably a lot of the people who voted for him: white working class people; people who are going to depend on benefits. Immigrants, certainly undocumented immigrants, people of colour, gay people, with his attack on the diversity agenda. The whole public sector is being gutted. A massive transfer of wealth from public institutions into private pockets. Thousands of people who were involved in diversity/equality lost their jobs in a very short space of time. Hundreds of thousands around the world are affected by the gutting of the World Health funds – USAID. That’s already killing people on the ground who depended on antiviral medications, health clinics.

DR: Presumably the billionaires will be very pleased that Trump has been elected.

MF: Did you see the inauguration? They were all arrayed behind him. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk… They came to kiss the ring. Do you need a better public display of oligarchy?

DR: How are the US media relating to all this?

MF: The establishment media has raised critical questions, but they’ve not pushed it. He’s gutted the press corps, so it’s all sycophants, his chosen media. He’s launching a systematic attack on the public TV and radio. The really independent media are in a bad place. The mainstream media? They just care about ratings. Trump is Trump.

DR: Here the media have fallen for Trump making himself the centre of global news stories. Every day: “Trump said this,” “Trump did that.” I remember from Trump Mark 1, many Jewish people and groups were mobilising against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) Is that happening now?

MF: There’s a lot of interfaith work on immigrant rights against the mass deportations, for sanctuary. There’s an immigrant freedom ride starting in New York, going all the way down to New Orleans, where there’s a detention centre. People from New York have been shipped there, including Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian campus leader, though he has now been released.

DR: Los Angeles has emerged as a centre of resistance to ICE.

MF: Only because Trump decided to push it so far, with troop deployments and grabbing people off the street. They haven’t done that to the same extent in New York. If they did, it would be happening here, too, for sure. In Los Angeles, though, it was an organic community response, largely Latino community and their allies. All ages, working people, neighbourhood people.

DR: Is there a similar level of involvement of Jewish political groups against ICE this time, or are they diverted more into Palestine activities?

MF:  More on the Palestine issue. But the work on immigrant rights is important, and this is actually coming out of synagogues on the ground, grassroots, not NGOs. It’s synagogue based. They’re making common cause with other minorities and faith groups, churches, mosques.

DR: What will Trump’s impact be on global politics, global economics, the planet?

MF: Trump and his supporters are rallying around the right. They rushed to the defence of the AfD in Germany. The first one out there was Vance, then Musk and then Rubio. Some time back they met in Budapest, with Orbán. He’s one of their heroes.

DR: Orbán’s election in 2018 was achieved largely through an antisemitic conspiracy theory about George Soros, with big posters everywhere.

MF But he’s a “good” antisemite!

DR: How will Trump affect Israel/Palestine?

MF: He’ll force the Palestinians out, create “Gaza Riviera”, pass it off to the Kushner real estate…

DR: Isn’t this just a wild fantasy? How much of this is serious?

MF:  The Israeli far right are taking it seriously. They see it as a green light to do what they’ve wanted to do for decades. Whether Trump does it himself?  It’s like, “Yeah, sure, we’ll turn a blind eye.”

DR: Is none of this a step too far for some of the US Jewish establishment bodies? Or are they just pleased that somebody’s talking like that.

MF: Would they rather he was doing this in a milder sort of way? They’re going to stay shtum on that if he’s “fighting against antisemitism”. They think that he’s not going to do much on the Palestine issue. He’s going to do his deals with corrupt Gulf States, and Palestine will be part of the equation. America’s always protected those kind of relations with Saudi Arabia and others.

DR: So, how do you understand Trump’s sudden military intervention on Iran in June?

MF: Up until the last minute Trump was saying, “I’m giving them two weeks…”. A lot of senior, more traditional anti-interventionist Republicans were saying, “Don’t do this,” but we did this.

DR: Was Trump played by Netanyahu, or did he really want to do it?

MF: He wanted to do it. A mutually helpful thing. Trump did the calculus and felt that it ultimately would be to his advantage. He thought there was enough of a hawkish base within the Republican Party that would go along with it. He trumpeted it afterwards as “a clear victory”, even when the CIA and the IAEA were saying otherwise. It’s a Trump world!

DR: How would you describe Trump’s real attitudes to the Jewish community? Before the election, he said that if he doesn’t get in, it’s because of those Jews.

MF: His attitude is completely transactional. If they do what he wants, then he’ll show them some support. If they don’t, they’ll be in the enemies list. Practically everyone is on that list by now. So we’re in good company: unions, colleges, even big law firms.

DR: What are the trade unions making of all of this?

MF : Union leaderships supported Harris and the Democrats. There were a few notable exceptions: the teamsters. The rank and file were more split, with significant union membership voting for Trump. A grouping called the Left Labor Project are working with the progressive unions to mount a response, particularly on municipal jobs. But across the board – labour, the Democratic party – there’s a complete lack of coherent strategy and real leadership.

DR: Who does Trump fear?

MF:  I don’t know that he fears anyone. He’s been so unchallenged in everything he’s tried to do. The Congress has rolled over; the courts mostly haven’t, but even where they blocked him, he just ran right over them and ignored their issue with the judgments. Why should he fear anybody at this point? There isn’t a coherent opposition. The Democrats are going to win the mid-terms and we’ll regain at least the House, and then there’ll be some blocking, maybe, but it’s not a strategy. We need a consistent, economic justice, populist agenda that doesn’t throw it over to white nationalism or Christian nationalists.  We just ceded the ground on that. The Democrats are almost as much about tax cuts as the Republicans. They get almost as much money from Wall Street as the Republicans.

DR: It’s interesting that you’re centring the economic issues, because in our anti-racist movements here, many people operate in silos. They focus on racism, but some of us want to link it up more explicitly with housing, education and other economic issues.

MF: There is also a revival of certain kinds of identity politics. The right appeals, the left appeals. I get it. People run to safety with their tribe. That makes sense in many cases. But if you’re really about building an oppositiongoing to your corner is not going to do it!

DR: Coming back to the Jewish community, are there any grounds for optimism in the current situation?

MF: By and large, the Jewish community rejected Trump and Make America Great Again (MAGA). They voted against it. The antisemitism issue gets played and weaponised, but in the main his agenda is abhorrent to the Jewish community. How they’ll turn that into active opposition other than voting, I don’t know.

DR: Hasn’t something special and energising just happened in New York with left winger Zohran Mamdani, cross-endorsed by a Jewish candidate and winning the Democratic primary for the Mayoral Election there?

MF: It’s the most stunning thing I’ve seen politically in New York since I’ve been here. It all came down in such a flash. The amazing thing0= was that we had Mahmoud Khalil’s release within the same week as Mamdani’s victory. The 1-2 punch against Trump!

DR: Was Mamdani’s victory expected or was that a surprise?

MF: It was a surprise. His opponent, Andrew Cuomo, had massive inputs of real estate money. Billionaires who’d even funded the Trump campaign were intervening on his side. He had the name recognition, and they had pulled out the stock scare tactics for the Jewish community, like, “This guy Mamdani’s dangerous, not just anti-Zionist, but an antisemite.” it worked to an extent – more so among older voters. The Upper West Side liberal Jewish vote pretty much went for Cuomo. But the younger voters propelled Mamdani’s campaign. An army of Gen Z volunteers, everybody, including young Jews, got out and did it. They canvassed a million people. Every other day I was getting an invitation. “Come to Harlem… Come to Brooklyn…”. It was the largest turnout in a New York primary in 50 years.

DR: I presume Jewish bodies like JFREJ were involved.

MF: Very involved. They invited him into a number of their community-wide events. They recruited volunteers.

DR: I saw clips of Mamdani being interviewed with the left-wing Jewish candidate, Brad Lander (who we knew when he was studying in London more than 30 years ago). Their friendship and mutual support must have been powerful.

MF: It was. Brad Lander was the chief Jewish shield deflector ally to Mamdani. I don’t know what their cross-endorsement did in terms of votes for Mamdani, but just the symbolic fact of doing it was important.

DR: We’ve seen headlines that Trump wants to deport Mamdani.

MF: That’s completely predictable: “He’s a Communist.” “He’s not an American Citizen.” He’s going to retread that one used against Obama. But more shocking is that the Republican and Democrat establishment state-wide in New York City has finally found something to unite on. It’s hatred and opposition to Mamdani. He so threatens the establishment in both.

DR: So it will be decided in New York on 4th November?

MF: Yes. The current mayor is running again as an independent. Cuomo invented some party that he’s going to run on. We’ve got a Republican who’s a Trump supporter. All the forces that were intervening in the primary are not going to give up.

DR: But it sounds like Mamdani’s got a pretty good chance.

MF: I would say, yes!

DR: Good luck to Zohran Mamdani!