Terry Moran of ABC News put on his crypto-fascist hat and declared President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech had “overtones” of the 1930s “anti-Semitic movement” because the President dared to put the words “America’ and “first” together.
Moran began by conceding Trump’s message was “why he was sent here, by people who want to hear that message of America first.”
“However, it carries with it overtones from the 1930s, when an anti-Semitic movement saying, ‘We don’t want to get involved in Europe’s war. It’s the Jews’ fault in Germany,’” he pontificated, before adding ominously, “Charles Lindbergh led them.”
“It is a term, as he defined it his way, but the words themselves carry very ugly echoes in our history,” said Moran, serving notice the new President that he must carefully consider the psychotic delusions of paranoid ABC News reporters before choosing his every word. Apparently Trump can explain what he means a million times without exorcising the ghost of Charles Lindbergh from certain imaginations.
This is an especially outrageous charge to level at Trump when his inauguration included the first benediction from an Orthodox rabbi ever, and the first Jewish prayer since Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural. Not only that, but Rabbi Marvin Hier is the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. He’s probably a lot better than Terry Moran at detecting actual anti-Semitism.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism before she was married to Jared Kushner in 2009. Trump declared himself “glad” about her decision in public. He’s also been very public about his support for Israel, including his intention to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. His predecessor, Barack Obama, closed out his second term with a spectacular betrayal of Israel at the United Nations, winning loud applause from people openly pledged to murdering Jews. Did that make Terry Moran’s anti-Semitism detector twitch a bit?
People who listened to Trump’s speech probably found it a nice change of pace to have an American president who thinks the needs of the American people come first for a change, just as most other world leaders tend to work for the best interests of their respective nations.
While they were having these thoughts, squads of black-clad left-wingers were smashing windows, blocking traffic, and assaulting police officers across Washington, D.C. If they had Terry Moran’s finely tuned sense of historical irony, they’d have been wearing brown shirts instead of black.
Moran didn’t invent this smear — many other Trump critics have previously accused him of using “America first” language to send coded messages to neo-Nazis, or of witlessly using the phrase without understanding its pedigree. Some of the same people think Trump deliberately quoted the Batman supervillain Bane in his inaugural speech.