All That Glitters Isn’t Gold

I’ve been away from D.C. for much of the summer, escaping the ongoing remaking of our nation’s capital in Donald Trump’s image. This includes the construction of his 90,000-foot ballroom, the recent addition of a granite helipad on the White House South Lawn, and three-story banners of Trump’s face marring the facade of federal office buildings. The latest example of Trump’s excessive D.C. renovations landed as an image in my text messages yesterday, and I’m sharing it as a metaphor for his so-called commitment to Jewish safety and security.

For the 26 years that I’ve lived in D.C., I haven’t paid much attention to the large bronze statues at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Apparently, these two statues, known as the Arts of War and Arts of Peace, were given to the United States by Italy in 1951 for helping to rebuild the country after WWII. Ironically, after being gifted to the U.S. for defeating dictatorship, Trump decided the statues must be gilded in gold as part of his autocratic, self-aggrandizing spending spree.

This week, I received an image of the statues adorning Memorial Bridge, now covered in a coat of sparkling gold leaf, and was reminded that with Donald Trump, all that glitters isn’t really gold. Most of it is an illusion, intended to deceive. The president covers everything with a golden veneer to provide a false sense of value and opulence, but it’s sometimes fake and typically only paper-thin.

Trump’s alleged commitment to Jewish safety and security is similar – superficial, shallow, and not quite as it seems. We saw one such example this week, which exposed Trump’s efforts to combat antisemitism as no more than a politically expedient ruse. Evidence emerged from a Department of Justice (DOJ) whistleblower that the Trump White House exploited the rise of antisemitism to pursue its anti-immigration, anti-DEI, and anti-education funding agenda.

In February 2025, Trump launched a campaign led by the so-called Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to investigate how universities handled antisemitism on college campuses. The next month, the administration cut funding to the very government agencies working to prevent antisemitism, including the Department of Education (DOE), which enforces Title VI complaints about antisemitism on campus. This included eliminating half the regional offices for DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, which restricted the Department’s ability to investigate antisemitic incidents in education. So while Trump talked a big game about Jewish safety and security, he defunded the very offices intended to ensure our safety and security on campus, while also freezing funding intended to harden security at synagogues and Jewish institutions.

This week, a whistleblower report released by the House Judiciary Committee presented evidence that Trump’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was a farce, pushing for settlements with Ivy League universities amid investigation outcomes that were “predetermined” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money and demand funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism. In other words, Trump exploited antisemitism on campuses to extort and defund Ivy League schools.

As Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote in a letter to the DOJ, the Committee had a detailed report that Donald Trump’s White House “exploited genuine concerns voiced about Jewish safety on Ivy League campuses for the purposes of scoring partisan political gains and attacking your perceived institutional enemies in academia.” While acknowledging that “antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real [and] it needs to be addressed seriously,” Rep. Raskin concluded that Trump DOJ’s investigations into antisemitism were “fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”

While some may believe that Donald Trump – and by extension, Republicans in Congress, whom he controls – are the answer when it comes to defending Jewish Americans from the rise of antisemitism, that too is an illusion. The reality is that Jewish safety and security are linked to the strength of our democracy and democratic institutions, which Trump has repeatedly attacked and degraded. These attacks on democracy have been met with GOP silence and acquiescence, even when it has meant compromising their own authorities as mandated by the Constitution.

If you are considering voting for any Republicans this November because you think they’ll provide a necessary check on rising antisemitism, I would challenge you to consider Donald Trump’s record, of which every Republican is now a part. It’s filled with false promises, lies, corruption, and delusion, including as it relates to Jewish security and democracy. Don’t be fooled into thinking election denialism is the best way to ensure Jewish safety. It’s not.

All that glimmers is not really gold, including the superficial veneer, misleading rhetoric, and self-serving deceptive actions of this White House. This is why JDCA is working hard to elect Democrats who share our values, to serve as an essential guardrail on this White House, in just ten weeks. We only support Democrats, but we don’t support all Democrats. We’re focused on those Democrats who stand with the Jewish community – including in the critically important fight against antisemitism – and can help Democrats secure the House and Senate majorities. We hope you’ll join and support our efforts today.