Full disclosure requires that I admit to voting for Donald Trump and fully supporting him as president of the United States. Of course my friends here in New York, especially the Jewish ones, thought I was absolutely meshugah for coming out of the conservative closet. However, I saw an extremely successful businessman, who I believed could take a much needed new approach to government.
A Holocaust survivor mother raised me to be an independent thinker, and not necessarily follow all of those Democrat Jewish sheep — which is why I will never be one of those leftist progressive zombies for whom our previous president could do no wrong.
When President Trump makes a serious error, he should be called out on it. Trump’s first week in office was a positive reinvention of the presidency — from pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact to penalizing companies for moving manufacturing out of the country, he is fulfilling his campaign promises to the millions of Americans who voted for him.
Of course President Trump will still be candidate Trump for the next four to eight years, continuing to run against the “obstructionist” Democrat Party, the elite “gotcha” Media and the ticket of “sorry losers” John McCain and Lindsay Graham. We all know that if President Trump cured cancer, tomorrow’s headline in The New York Times would read, “Trump Responsible for 2 million Job Losses,” since all cancer research, studies and efforts would end.
It was International Holocaust Day that brought President Trump his first major mistake, and it was a serious one. The White House issued a 117-word statement which said, “It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.” No mention of Jews and no mention of anti-Semitism.
Can you envision anyone on International Slavery Day at the United Nations not mentioning the pain and torture that blacks lived through in history? Imagine working on a press release in the Oval Office that contained an emphasis on concepts like, “in the interest of inclusiveness, we would like to mention all of the various groups that were slaves throughout the centuries. After all, Jews were slaves in Egypt. So we won’t mention blacks specifically.” No, they own the term “slavery,” just like Jews own the term “Holocaust.” Remember, it is not called “a Holocaust,” it is called “the Holocaust,” because it was the greatest evil done to one people in history.
Of course many other people died from Nazi evil. Yet the vast effort of torture, murder, gas chambers, crematoria and cruelty was fixated on the Jews. The purpose of Nazism was to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the earth. When the Nazis could have sent trucks to the Russian front to help them in their war effort, they instead directed those trucks to pick up Jews and take them to Auschwitz and Treblinka. They did not specifically pick up gypsies, gays or any other group — although they happily killed them. It was Jews, especially Jewish babies, who were their targets.
How Donald Trump and Jared Kushner do not understand this very basic concept is a serious issue. Jews do not need the Trump administration’s recognition. General Dwight Eisenhower, upon entering a concentration camp right after World War II, made sure the world would see and remember this massive cruelty and genocide of Jews. Most Trump supporters know that The Donald has a speech filter issue which unfortunately gives his opposition great ammunition to criticize him. Any intelligent, patriotic American should say that President Trump has so many other excellent qualities that we can disregard or laugh about his occasional embarrassing comments. After all, we are all human.
However, his misrepresentation of the Holocaust as being a kumbaya moment for all sufferers of history is a moral error of grave proportions. Trump has paid too much attention to the American Left that has imbibed the Bernie Sanders approach of inclusiveness for all, thus rewriting history. Amazing that the person who much of Middle America elected to stop this leftist virus has himself gotten infected.
Irwin N. Graulich is a motivational speaker and columnist on ethics, morality, Judaism, religion and politics. He is also president of Bloch Graulich Whelan Inc., a marketing, communications and branding company in New York City.
