One of the country’s most prominent nonprofit civil rights organizations announced Sunday that it plans to redirect all donations it has received from Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump towards anti-intolerance education.
“This is not a matter of Trump making controversial statements,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and director of the Anti-Defamation League, told TPM in a Monday interview. “This is a matter of saying things that profoundly conflict with core American values of pluralism and tolerance.”
Greenblatt announced the ADL’s decision to reallocate the $56,000 Trump has donated to the group over the past decade in an op-ed in Time magazine on Sunday. The bulk of the funds will go towards the group’s “No Place For Hate” program, which educates middle and high school students about the effects of bullying and bias.
High school basketball games in Iowa and Indiana were interrupted in recent weeks by students chanting Trump’s name and shouting “build a wall” at opposing teams from more diverse schools.
Greenblatt said there was no particular incident that pushed the ADL to reach this decision, though. He said ADL leadership instead was motivated by the cumulative effect of the GOP candidate’s unwillingness to condemn violent incidents at his rallies, in addition to his support from white supremacists like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
“As a non-profit, we don’t have an opinion. We don’t take a position on candidates or on political parties. We don’t support them or endorse them,” Greenblatt said. “But we have felt obliged to call out rhetoric that is very troublesome—rhetoric in particular that Donald Trump has made with regards to people based on their national origin or their faith or their gender, and his initial failure to strongly speak out against the KKK and David Duke.”
Former ADL head Abe Foxman previously chastised the New York real estate mogul for asking supporters to pledge allegiance to him at rallies while raising their right arms. Foxman called that an intentional “fascist gesture” that clearly evoked Nazi salutes.
Greenblatt said Trump’s chaotic rallies and mainstreaming of radical rhetoric are unlike anything witnessed during U.S. presidential campaigns in decades.
“We haven’t seen that in a very, very long time,” Greenblatt said. “You’d have to go back to George Wallace to see a similar rhetoric of hate reaching this level. There were people like Pat Buchanan in more recent eras but none of them got quite this far.”
Greenblatt said he feels that Trump made donations to the ADL “with sincerity,” but said he hoped redirecting the funds towards anti-bias education served as a concrete rebuke to Trump’s intolerant rhetoric. To his knowledge, the organization has not reallocated funds from donors in this way before.
“I would hope other groups see this as an opportunity,” Greenblatt said. “Rather than just complaining about rhetoric they don’t like or issuing press releases, to step up in the way that we’re doing and to redirect funds or invest money—it could be in our No Place For Hate program, it could be in other similar programs—we would love for others to join us in this effort.”
“By the way, we would love for Mr. Trump to join us too,” he added.
