In 1972, Richard Nixon visited Poland while it was still under Soviet domination. People were so excited that even those far away from the capital stayed home to watch the coverage on TV. Gerald Ford came to Poland soon after, and Jimmy Carter was there in 1977. Both Ford and Carter were greeted by crowds waving homemade US flags, then unavailable for sale in Poland. George H. W. Bush was there to welcome the new democratic government in 1989. The streets of Warsaw overflowed in 1994 as Bill Clinton came to call for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. Clinton was back again three years later to welcome Poland into the alliance. George W. Bush made three trips to Poland, including one in which he endorsed their entry into the European Union. Barack Obama stopped by Poland and confounded security to walk through the streets shaking hands with the Polish people. Obama came to Poland twice more (it would have been three times, but one flight was canceled due to volcano).
So while Poland has long been a frequent stop for America presidents abroad, there is one big difference between those previous visits and that of Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump is … the first sitting American president in decades to visit Warsaw while forgoing a stop at the city’s monument to the Jewish Ghetto Uprising.
Why skip this stop? Because Trump’s bused-in crowd of nationalist supporters aren’t just anti-immigrant, they’re anti-Semitic.
“From this government’s point of view, to be Polish is to be ethnically Polish, speak the Polish language, and be Catholic,” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, program director at Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, said in an interview. “This is how they approach Polish history.”
Trump gave the nationalists just the appearance, and the words, that they wanted.
“His visit was carefully orchestrated to be consistent with the right-wing government in Poland,” added Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “From their point of view, all that mattered is the monument to the Warsaw Uprising, a story of Polish heroism and martyrdom.”
Earlier, Trump’s announcement on Holocaust Memorial Day failed to mention the victims of the Holocaust.
In a departure from predecessors on both sides of the political aisle, President Trump’s statement Friday marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day did not mention the deaths of six million Jews — a lapse the head of the Anti-Defamation League called “puzzling and troubling.”
It’s the same sort of lapse that Republican Congressman Clay Higgins made when he filmed an Auschwitz selfie.
There’s one message Higgins doesn’t deliver. Though he talks about “poor souls” and “innocent civilians” and “slave labor prisoners,” Higgins never says the word Jews.
Nationalists in both America and Poland are erasing Jews from the story of the Holocaust. At the same time, they’re creating a new enemy. Trump painted Islamic extremists as an existential threat to civilization, asking if the West has the “will to survive.” On his visit to Auschwitz, Higgins painted the death camp as something that could be forced on America by Muslims—though he had a solution.
"Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down,” he wrote. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all.”