The Handbasket - It was never about antisemitism

From abducting college students to an attack on a Jewish governor, Trump’s real motivations remain clear.

Marisa Kabas
April 15, 2025

When Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro gathered family and friends at his residence Saturday evening to celebrate the first night of Passover, he never could have imagined that the religious texts in their hands would end up charred fragments just hours later. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, a man hopped the fence, entered the home, set off a firebomb, and fled undetected. Everyone inside escaped physically unscathed, but had two large doors on the first floor not been closed, the entire building could’ve gone up in flames.

It remains unclear what exactly motivated the arsonist, but the circumstances lent themselves to some pretty clear inferences: A vocally Jewish elected official had his house torched on one of the most important nights of the Hebrew calendar. Luckily the current president has made fighting antisemitism a cornerstone of his reign and would quickly step in to condemn an act that appeared, at least on its face, to be motivated by antisemitism, right? Wrong.

Trump remained mum all day Sunday into Monday about the attempt on Governor Shapiro’s life until he was finally asked about it during his Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. A day and half of thinking yielded this response: "He was probably just a whack job and certainly a thing like that can not be allowed to happen.”

This complete lack of care for an overtly Jewish situation happens to coincide with the Trump administration going full bore in its faux crusade against antisemitism. They’ve begun withholding millions in funding for universities until they meet some opaque standard, searching the social media accounts of student visa holders to find reasons to revoke their legal stay in the US, and disappearing people in support of Palestinian liberation to immigrant detention facilities.

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