(Jewish Group) Trump destroyed the guardrails against antisemitism -- and there's no going back

[Behind the Aegis]

In September 1988, James Baker fired four members of an ethnic outreach coalition he’d recently established. Baker, then manager of Vice President George Bush Sr.’s campaign for president, made the move soon after a news story revealed their past associations with a variety of fascist or antisemitic organizations.

In one case, it wasn’t even entirely a first-degree association. Florian Galdau, a New York archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church, had been a loyal and zealous defender of that sect’s U.S. leader — a prominent, self-confessed activist during World War II of the Iron Guard, Romania’s wartime pro-Nazi movement. Galdau staunchly backed his superior, Valerian Trifa, during the Justice Department’s effort to deport him for lying about this past to gain entry to the country and obtain American citizenship.

The three other members of the American Nationalities Coalition included a Croatian American active in organizations that denied the Holocaust, a Catholic priest listed in Italy as a member of a neo-fascist secret organization, and a Republican activist who had served as a junior envoy to Berlin of Hungary’s pro-Nazi Arrow Cross regime during World War II.

As the reporter who broke that story, I recognized that the Bush campaign was acting in line with the Talmudic mandate to “build a fence around the Torah,” that is, to construct outer guardrails around the principles you hold dear.

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