President Trump has a Holocaust problem. His staff keeps on getting the event’s history, as well as its memory and its meaning, wrong. At this point, only Trump himself can fix that problem. And while he’s at it, he can fix the Holocaust problems of previous administrations. In his talk in the Capitol Rotunda tomorrow in the annual “Days of Remembrance Ceremony” commemorating the Holocaust, he’ll be able to do that.
The Holocaust was a unique fracture in moral history, the most extreme evil ever perpetrated, and the cruelest assault on what it is, and what it means, to be human. To get its history wrong, and to confuse the public’s memory about it, is not only beyond politics—it’s beyond the bounds of conscience. By getting it wrong, his administration committed a crime against what we are because it undermined the best bulwark we have against committing such a deed again. By undoing his staff’s errors tomorrow, Trump can redeem both his administration and himself.
Trump’s Holocaust problem first displayed itself first when, on January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, his staff released a statement commemorating the Holocaust but, unlike previous presidents, omitting mention of its victims—the Jews.
Senator Tim Kaine explained just what was wrong with that omission: “The final solution was about the slaughter of Jews. We have to remember this. This is what Holocaust denial is. It's either to deny that it happened or many Holocaust deniers acknowledge, "Oh yeah people were killed. But it was a lot of innocent people. Jews weren't targeted."
Trump’s White House doubled-down in the face of widespread criticism. Trying to turn a flagrant gaffe into an elevated virtue, its spokesperson, Hope Hicks, said the omission of the Jews was done to emphasize the universality of the Holocaust: “Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.” The White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, echoed this universalizing excuse, referring to “everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust.” And its Communications Director, Sean Spicer, called the criticism “ridiculous,” “pathetic” and “nitpicking.” Watching these PR contortions was painful.
The Trump White House’s second gaffe occurred when, in response to the use by the Syrian government of sarin gas, Sean Spicer compared the head of that government, Bashar al-Assad, favorably to Hitler: "Hitler didn't even sink to the level of using chemical weapons” during World War II. In fact, thousands of Jews were gassed to death each day on many days in Nazi death camps. Trying to dig himself out of that hole, he defended himself by saying that Hitler didn’t gas his own people, as if that’s worse than gassing other people. As it happens, many of the persons gassed in those “Holocaust centers” were Hitler’s his own people--German Jews (though, to be sure, Hitler didn’t consider those people, or any Jewish people, to be people the way other people are people). Finally, in a rare move, Spicer apologized for this betrayal of both history and memory. No amount of PR acrobatics could explain it away.
As it happens, previous presidents have also had Holocaust problems.
In 1979, for example, Jimmy Carter, during the first “Days of Remembrance” ceremony, in his own effort at universalizing the Holocaust, spoke of “eleven million innocent victims exterminated—six million of them Jews.” And in an executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Presidentially-appointed board overseeing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he rejected the wording in the report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, headed by Elie Wiesel, which stressed the specifically Jewish essence of the Holocaust and noted that “any attempt to dilute or deny this reality would be to falsify it in the name of misguided universalism.”
The eleven million number was, in fact, an invention by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter. There were many more than five million other victims of Nazi brutality. But they weren’t murdered as part of the Holocaust. They weren’t murdered as part of a systematic and industrialized genocidal campaign to eliminate every member of an entire group. Wiesenthal invented that number shortly after World War II. He feared that people wouldn’t be interested in just the murder of the Jews, so he added an arbitrary number of other victims—five million. Carter apparently found that focusing on the Jews too parochial, too specific, and inadequately universal.
And in 1998 a member of President Clinton’s Israeli-Palestinian peace team at the State Department, who happened also to be a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Presidentially-appointed board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, had the idea of inviting Yasser Arafat to tour the Holocaust Museum. As the museum’s director, I was asked to escort Arafat. I objected that this was a misuse of the Holocaust dead and refused, considering the refusal an act of conscience in a museum of conscience. It was obvious that the visit was to be a photo-op designed to convince Jews, both American and Israeli, that Arafat really understood their pain and their need for security. No one anticipated, apparently, that Arafat might emerge from such a visit not expressing empathy for the victims of the Holocaust but insisting that the Israelis were the new Nazis.
Fortunately, Monica Lewinsky saved the museum from that particular political misuse. The story of her dalliance with Clinton broke just as Arafat was supposed to visit. The press corps decamped to the White House to cover it. There would be no photos. Arafat canceled. Twelve years later, the State Department employee who proposed the idea of the Arafat visit admitted that inviting him to the museum was “one of the dumbest ideas in the annals of U.S foreign policy.”
So what should President Trump say in his speech in the Capitol Rotunda? He should say, very clearly, what the Holocaust was—the systematic, state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany of every Jew it could find. He should say that this atrocity has lessons for all of humanity. And he should stress that Holocaust memory should not only be pure and accurate but that it should never be used to achieve political or diplomatic ends.
If President Trump says this, then he’ll not only fix his own administration’s Holocaust problem but also repair the Holocaust problems of past administrations. That would be a great closing achievement for the first hundred days of his presidency.