🇮🇱 From The Apprentice to Jerusalem: How Jewish New York Helped Shape Trump

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To understand Trump’s relationship with Jewish America and Israel, it is tempting to begin with the White House — with the embassy in Jerusalem, Jared Kushner, the Abraham Accords, or Trump’s unusually close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the story actually begins much earlier. It begins in New York, in the worlds of real estate, television, law and deal-making that shaped Trump long before he entered politics. And one of the most revealing places to start is television.

In 2004, Trump became the star of The Apprentice, the reality show that transformed him from a famous New York developer into a national celebrity.

The program did more than put Trump on television. It created a political persona before Trump was even a politician: the powerful businessman, the ruthless negotiator, the billionaire who supposedly knew how to recognize talent, punish failure and make decisions without hesitation. His signature phrase — “You’re fired” — became part of American popular culture.

The show was created by British television producer Mark Burnett, but its success depended on something Trump had already spent decades cultivating: his image as the ultimate New York deal-maker.

The Apprentice turned that image into a mass-market product. Millions of Americans who knew little about Trump’s actual business career suddenly knew his face, his voice and his mythology.

Years later, political analysts would point to the show as one of the most important pieces of infrastructure behind Trump’s political rise. Before he had a political movement, he had an audience. Before he had a campaign organization, he had a recognizable character.

Television had already done much of the work of introducing “Donald Trump” as a national political brand. There was also a revealing Jewish connection to the television chapter.

During negotiations over his Apprentice contract, Trump reportedly wondered whether he needed a Jewish agent because he believed a Jewish representative might be better at negotiating the deal.

The anecdote, reported by The New York Times and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2016, is striking less as evidence of some hidden influence than as a window into Trump's own understanding of New York’s business culture.

Trump had spent his entire adult life in a city where Jewish lawyers, bankers, developers, agents, media executives and entrepreneurs were an important part of the professional networks surrounding real estate and entertainment. He understood that network as a source of power. But television was only one part of the story.

Perhaps the most consequential Jewish figure in Trump's early career was Roy Cohn.

Cohn was a powerful New York lawyer, political operator and one of the city's most controversial public figures. He had worked as a prosecutor in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, became a close associate of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and eventually established himself as a formidable fixer in New York’s legal and political worlds.

Trump met Cohn in the 1970s, when the young real-estate developer was facing battles with New York authorities over alleged discriminatory practices in his apartment buildings.

Cohn became Trump's lawyer and, over the following years, much more than that. He became a mentor. The lessons Trump absorbed from Cohn were not primarily about Judaism or Israel. They were about power.

Cohn's philosophy was famously combative: never concede weakness, attack opponents aggressively, use the media, and turn legal or political pressure into a public relations battle. Trump adopted many of these habits and carried them with him for decades.

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The style that would later define his presidential campaigns — personal attacks, relentless media engagement, refusal to apologize and an instinct to treat politics as combat — has often been traced back to the world of Roy Cohn.

That relationship is crucial because it demonstrates the difference between “Jewish influence” and an ethnic or religious conspiracy.

Cohn was one individual. He was Jewish, but the influence he exercised over Trump came from his personality, his profession, his connections and his political experience — not from representing Jewish people as a group.

The same distinction becomes essential when we look at Trump’s later relationship with Israel.

Trump did not suddenly discover Israel after becoming president. His connections to Jewish Americans and to the Israeli-American political world had been developing for decades. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, a member of a prominent Orthodox Jewish real-estate family.

Kushner eventually became one of the most powerful figures in Trump's political orbit. During the first Trump administration, he served as a senior White House adviser and became deeply involved in Middle East diplomacy. His role was particularly significant because he was not merely a symbolic Jewish connection to the president.

He was part of Trump's inner circle and had direct access to the president on some of the most consequential foreign-policy questions facing the administration.

Through Kushner, Trump's personal and political worlds became even more intertwined with American Jewish institutions, donors and Israel-related policy circles. Then there was David Friedman.

Friedman was a bankruptcy lawyer, a longtime friend of Trump and another figure from the New York legal world.

Unlike many traditional American diplomats, Friedman was an outspoken supporter of Israel's settlement movement and maintained close ties to Israeli leaders and right-wing political circles. Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Jason Greenblatt, another Orthodox Jewish lawyer who had worked for the Trump Organization, also became a central figure in the administration's Middle East policy. Together with Kushner and Friedman, he helped develop the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The policy consequences were enormous. In 2017, Trump announced that the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and would move the American embassy there. The embassy officially opened in Jerusalem in 2018.

The administration also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019, a dramatic break with longstanding American policy. And in 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement, taking a position strongly favored by Netanyahu's government and many American supporters of a more confrontational policy toward Tehran.

Then came the Abraham Accords. In 2020, the Trump administration helped broker agreements that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by normalization moves involving Morocco and Sudan.

The agreements represented one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of Trump's first term in the Middle East.

None of this can be explained simply by saying that “Jewish advisers influenced Trump.”

Trump himself had strong political instincts about Israel. Evangelical Christians were a major part of his electoral coalition and among the strongest supporters of his pro-Israel policies. Republican donors and activists also played an important role.

Netanyahu's government had its own strategic interests. And Trump increasingly saw confrontation with Iran as central to his Middle East worldview.

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The Jewish influence was therefore neither singular nor uniform.

American Jews themselves are politically diverse. Many are liberal Democrats and have been deeply critical of Trump. Others are conservative Republicans and some became enthusiastic supporters of his Israel policies.

Orthodox Jewish communities, evangelical Christians, pro-Israel organizations, wealthy donors, Republican strategists and Israeli officials all interacted with the Trump administration in different ways.

That diversity is precisely why the story is more interesting than a simple claim about “Jewish influence.” What we see instead is a series of relationships.

A Jewish New York lawyer, Roy Cohn, helped teach a young Trump how to fight and how to use publicity as a weapon.

A television industry turned that New York persona into a national brand.

Trump's daughter entered an Orthodox Jewish family through her marriage to Jared Kushner, bringing one of America's most prominent Jewish real-estate families into the president's immediate family circle. Kushner became a senior political adviser.

Friedman and Greenblatt brought their own views, networks and experience into Trump's foreign-policy operation.

And the resulting administration made decisions on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Iran and Arab-Israeli normalization that fundamentally changed American Middle East policy.

There is another dimension to this story as well: Trump's own understanding of Jewish success.

Throughout his career, Trump repeatedly operated in environments where he encountered successful Jewish businessmen, lawyers, media executives and political figures. Sometimes his comments about Jews were crude or stereotypical; sometimes they were admiring; often they reflected the transactional worldview through which he understood almost every relationship.

Trump tends to see politics through people rather than institutions — who is loyal, who is useful, who has access, who can negotiate, who can deliver. In that sense, the individuals around him mattered enormously. Personal relationships often became channels through which policy was shaped.

And that may be the most important point. The history of Trump's relationship with Jewish America is not the history of a president being controlled by “the Jews.” There is no evidence for such a collective explanation, and it reduces a complicated political history to an ethnic stereotype.

The real story is more concrete — and arguably more fascinating.

For decades, Trump moved through a particular New York ecosystem of lawyers, developers, financiers, entertainers and media figures. Some of the people who became important to him were Jewish. Some were not. What mattered was not their ethnicity alone, but their individual influence, access, expertise and ability to operate inside the worlds Trump trusted.

By the time he reached the White House, many of those relationships had evolved into a political network.

The journey from Roy Cohn's Manhattan office to the Oval Office, from The Apprentice to Jerusalem, was not a straight line. But it reveals something fundamental about Trump: his politics did not emerge from nowhere in 2016. They were built over decades, in the institutions and relationships of New York — and some of the most consequential figures along that path were Jewish.

Trump's relationship with Jewish America and Israel, in other words, did not begin in the White House.

It began much earlier — in the boardrooms, courtrooms, television studios and social networks of New York.

And by the time Trump arrived in Washington, those old relationships were already part of the architecture of his power.

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