"SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE ANTI-SEMITES":

[F]irst, the record: He'd been in office just a week when International Holocaust Remembrance Day rolled round and his administration issued a statement that bizarrely omitted any specific mention of Jews. Administration officials made no apology, saying that millions of people who weren't Jewish died in the Holocaust and that by not singling out any one group of victims, the White House had taken a more "inclusive" approach.

Then there was an initial, strange silence from Trump and his aides about a rash of anti-Semitic vandalism and bomb threats around the country in January and February.

In May, in Israel, Trump insisted on a much shorter stop at Yad Vashem, an important Holocaust memorial and museum, than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush had made, and he stuck to that plan even as many Israelis and American Jews cried foul. The tone-deaf breeziness of his approach was accentuated by the message he left in the visitors' book: "It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends -- so amazing & will never forget!" As Yair Rosenberg of the Jewish magazine Tablet tweeted, it was "basically just what teenagers write in each other's high school yearbooks."

Ivanka Trump went to the Warsaw memorial in her father's stead, though Trump softened that blow somewhat by mentioning, in his big Warsaw speech, that "the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland's Jewish citizens."

Ivanka converted to Judaism to marry Jared Kushner, and the couple's key roles in the White House mean that Trump has observant Jews at the very core of his presidency -- and of his life.

But that didn't stop him from making remarks to Jewish Republican donors in December 2015 that seemed to play into an anti-Semitic stereotype. "I'm a negotiator -- like you folks," he said, later adding: "Is there anybody that doesn't renegotiate deals in this room? Perhaps more than any room I've ever spoken to."

During his presidential campaign, he embraced the favor of groups and people who trafficked in white supremacy. He re-tweeted material from proudly anti-Semitic Twitter feeds, and prompted a furor by promoting an image that placed Hillary Clinton's face atop a pile of cash and beside a six-pointed star on which "most corrupt candidate ever" was written.

The website PolitiFact concluded that it was "unlikely that the Trump campaign intended to put out a Star of David image. In fact, the campaign moved to replace the star with a circle when the image gained attention." Even so, PolitiFact noted, Trump had an unusual habit of "using social media to broadcast material that comes from sources with a history of spreading racism, anti-Semitism or white supremacy."

I'm not convinced that Trump is much of an anti-Semite, any more than I'm convinced that he's much of a homophobe. (Racism and sexism are another matter.) But I think he's so thirsty for, and intoxicated by, whatever love comes his way that he's loath to rebuff the sources of it.

A prominent Jewish Republican put it well. "I think Trump is such a pathological narcissist that the act of telling people who love you that you reject them -- he can't get around that," he told me, interpreting Trump's reasoning this way: "What can be wrong with them? They're for me!"

Trump is disinclined to denounce any constituency or tactics that elevate him to the throne, where he's sure that he belongs. 

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