Trump’s nativism is contradictory. On the one hand, he depicts Latino immigrants as subhuman: “animals.” On the other, he describes them as so well organized and potent that they can invade and conquer the United States. Reconciling this tension requires another enemy: an enemy that is not only evil but brilliant, brilliant enough to organize people who cannot organize themselves. For some Trump supporters—egged on of late by the president’s references to George Soros—that’s where Jews come in.

It’s an old story. Noah Strote, a historian at North Carolina State, notes that after World War I, France imported soldiers from its North and West African colonies to help occupy the Rhineland. Adolf Hitler depicted these nonwhite soldiers as a sexual threat, much as Trump depicts Mexican “rapists” today. But he also portrayed them as politically passive. The Africans hadn’t organized their invasion of Germany; Jews had done it for them. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “It was and is the Jews who bring the Negro to the Rhineland, always with the same concealed goal and with the clear goal of destroying, through bastardization, the white race they hate.”

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During the civil-rights movement, white supremacists in the South made similar claims. “Segregationists believed that African Americans couldn’t possibly have the capacity to lead the civil-rights movement,” observes Mark Bauman, the editor of Southern Jewish History. “So it had to be the Jews and communists—the words were almost interchangeable: ‘Jewish communists.’” J. B. Stoner, founder of the virulently racist National States’ Rights Party, argued, “The negro is not the enemy. The Jew is THE enemy of our White Race and the Jew is using the negro in an effort to destroy the White Race that he so passionately hates.”

In South Africa, apartheid’s defenders deployed similar propaganda against Joe Slovo, the Yiddish-speaking leader of the African National Congress’s military wing. “To the South African government,” wrote Glenn Frankel, who covered South Africa for The Washington Post in the 1980s, “Slovo is Public Enemy Number One, the evil white mastermind … manipulating blacks inside his movement.”

A similar story line—Jewish brains using black and brown bodies to destroy white Christian America—runs through the anti-immigrant hysteria that laid the foundation for Trumpism. In his book, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Kevin MacDonald—perhaps America’s preeminent pseudo-academic white nationalist—claims that Jews are responsible for opening America’s borders to nonwhites. “Jewish organizations,” he wrote, “have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on U.S. immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent and politically astute.” Organized, intelligent, astute—and dedicated to helping “Latino activists” achieve their goal “of ‘reconquering’ the United States via immigration and high birth rates.” David Duke makes the point more crudely. “Jewish groups,” he declared in 2016, “lead the effort for Europe and America to take a catastrophic flood of non-European refugees/terrorists/rapists/criminals.”