Mixed reactions from America's Jewish leaders, lawmakers on Trump’s first 100 days
“Unlike other presidents who make empty promises, President Trump keeps his promises, delivering for the American Jewish community and pro-Israel patriots across our country,” RJC spokesman Sam Markstein told JNS.
As U.S. President Donald Trump reached the 100-day benchmark in his second term in the White House, members of the American Jewish community alternated between calling him “the greatest friend to Israel” and “a disaster for all America.”
“God bless Donald Trump,” Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who is Jewish, told JNS that Trump has “been a disaster for all of America” and that his administration “is cruel and dumb, mean and stupid, incompetent.”
The 100-day period has been a time to take stock of a new president’s time in office, since the flurry of legislation that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law during the Great Depression.
Speaking alongside Trump at the White House on Feb. 4, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the president the “greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” and Republicans in the United States have lined up behind Trump.
Trump’s first 100 days “have been a tour de force of decisive and effective action after years of malaise and weakness,” Republican Jewish Coalition spokesman Sam Markstein told JNS.
“Unlike other presidents who make empty promises, President Trump keeps his promises, delivering for the American Jewish community and pro-Israel patriots across our country,” Markstein said.
Markstein cited Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, his support of school choice and the administration’s crackdown on Jew-hatred on college campuses, including “deporting foreign pro-Hamas radicals.”
Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also lauded Trump’s record on Israel.
“AIPAC appreciates the strong pro-Israel actions President Trump has taken at the start of his term, including lifting holds on arms shipments, selling Israel billions in weapons, helping free hostages despicably held by Hamas and providing Israel the diplomatic and moral support in its fight against Iran and Iranian-backed terrorists,” Wittmann told JNS.
Klein, of ZOA, told JNS that Trump “continues to be the greatest friend of Israel and the Jewish people ever to serve as president.”
Trump has “made it clear that a Palestinian state would be a terrorist disaster and committed to never permitting Iran to get nukes,” Klein told JNS. “Additionally, he supports the right of Jews to live and build in Judea and Samaria.”
Even Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), who is Jewish, said she was happy with Trump’s support of the Jewish state.
“I am a very, very strong supporter of Israel and Israel’s security,” the Democrat told JNS. “So obviously I have been pleased that Trump has been in favor of maintaining our funding for Israel’s security without conditions. I think that’s very important.”
But another Jewish Democrat, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), said he wants Trump to show more urgency in securing the release of the remaining Hamas-held hostages, including New Jersey native Edan Alexander. Hamas captured more than 200 hostages during its terror attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“He came in very strong about getting Edan Alexander and the other hostages home immediately,” Gottheimer told JNS. “One hundred days in, he’s not home.”
“Overall, we need more urgency in both crushing the terrorists and getting the hostages home,” Gottheimer said. “They obviously talked a big game about getting Edan home and the other hostages home, but the proof will be when he’s back in Bergen County.”
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JNS that Trump has “not demonstrated support or a partnership” with the Jewish state. The president’s “actions have not been in Israel’s interest,” she said.
Soifer pointed to the 17% tariffs Trump placed on Israel just days after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich signed an order eliminating tariffs on goods from the U.S. (Trump announced a 90-day pause on the tariffs shortly after.)
Besides Trump’s support for the Jewish state, Republicans praised the president’s efforts to combat Jew-hatred, which has spiked since Oct. 7. Democrats said that they worry these efforts are being used as an excuse to silence criticism.
The Trump administration, for example, has sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate, an outspoken critic of Israel and strong supporter of the anti-Israel protests that emerged after the Hamas attack.
Klein thanked Trump for what he said was “his extraordinary fight against antisemitism,” including “removing federal funds from antisemitic universities who refuse to protect Jewish students.”
Trump has said that he is holding up billions of dollars of federal funds for several universities, charging that the schools have not taken adequate steps to curb antisemitism and protect their Jewish students. At Harvard University, for example, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million worth of contracts.
Some of those steps don’t sit well with Jewish Democrats.
“I think one thing that has concerned me is what I think is some of the overreach—some of these protesters on the college campuses who are getting arrested without due process,” Frankel told JNS.
“That’s what bothers me because I don’t like what a lot of these people said—trust me, I’m not their fan—but don’t violate due process in the name of Jews,” Frankel said. “We saw what happened in Nazi Germany.”
The practice also drew objections from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and four other Jewish senators, including Blumenthal, who told Trump in a letter to “stop the weaponization of antisemitism to attack America’s education institutions.”
US President Donald Trump bows his head while praying during an Easter prayer service and dinner in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.
Soifer said Trump has displayed “authoritarian behavior.”
“Defunding higher education, threatening attorneys and universities, and essentially extorting them is not going to make Jewish Americans more secure,” she told JNS. “He’s exploiting and using our community as an excuse to deport legal residents and others and making us all less safe.”
Some Jews sounded the alarm at Trump’s inauguration, when billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a gesture that some claimed was a Nazi salute, though Netanyahu, the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor said otherwise.
After the accusation, rather than denying the gesture was antisemitic, Musk posted a slew of Nazi puns on X—the social-media platform he owns—which the ADL condemned.
In a recent poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute, 72% of Jewish voters surveyed disapproved of Trump’s performance in office, with only 24% approving. The poll of 800 voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Respondents disapproved of the way Trump was handling antisemitism by 56% to 31%, and opposed deportations without a hearing by 71% to 23%.
“The vast majority of Jewish Americans do not have confidence in Trump and do not align with his policies,” Soifer told JNS. “He has enacted policies that are completely antithetical to our values.”
Large numbers also opposed proposed cuts to Medicaid (77% to 12%), the Department of Education (74% to 23%), Planned Parenthood (75% to 21%) and all agency budgets without congressional approval (74% to 18%).
Frankel told JNS that such spending reductions were against Jewish values.
“Cutting Medicaid, taking food from children, allowing millions of people to die around the world because they’re not getting their medicine, that all is very contrary to how I was brought up,” she said.
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Yesterday's employment numbers looked good for 45-47. Even CNN had to admit the numbers were up.
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