haaretz.com 'Abbas as ISIS': The 20-year old vying to be the face of Jewish Trump supporters
If you scroll down the Twitter feed of Jacob Wohl, former teenage hedge fund manager and current pro-Donald Trump provocateur, you’ll see a stream of insults directed at Robert Mueller, liberals and a proposed plastic straw ban.
And that was just Friday morning.
To his 158,000
followers, Wohl, 20, describes himself as “Conservative, Trump
Supporter, Zionist.” So he seemed like an interesting person to profile
for JTA. And in the 19 minutes before he hung up on me, Wohl said his
share of interesting things.
He
complained about children of immigrants who couldn’t speak English in
his second-grade class. He insisted that Puerto Rico, a territory of the
United States, has a socialist government. He equated the Palestinian Authority with ISIS.
“I think that
conservatives find that I really have my finger on the pulse of the
issues that matter,” Wohl said of his hyperactive Twitter feed, which
has gained nearly 100,000 followers in the past year. “I don’t spend a
lot of time on things I view as unimportant.”
The
weekend saw more bombastic tweets. On Sunday, Wohl called Trump “the
greatest friend of the Jewish People to ever occupy the White House.”
Two days earlier he called on Barack Obama to be extradited to Israel
for meddling in its 2015 elections. (A former Obama campaign aide,
Jeremy Bird, worked for a nonpartisan Israeli NGO that campaigned
against Benjamin Netanyahu. American campaign consultants of both
parties have a long history of working on Israeli elections.)
Also on Sunday, he
debated the causes of Puerto Rico’s economic misery with Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congressional nominee and a rising star of
progressive Democrats.
The way Wohl tells
his story, he began his first hedge fund, Wohl Capital Investment Group,
with money from high school classmates and their parents. In a
Bloomberg profile, he claimed the principal of his high school invested
with him. Subsequently he started another investment fund, Montgomery
Assets. Both funds are currently inactive.
But the young
investor, who has been called “The Wohl of Wall Street,” soon ran into
trouble and has been investigated by multiple regulatory organizations.
He also posted personal ads on Craigslist seeking attractive women while
claiming to run a modeling agency, according to the Daily Beast. One
woman accused him of posting her photo online, in a bra, as the “Wohl
Girl of the Month” without her permission. The domain WohlGirls.com
expired last month.
Wohl
told JTA that he now does due diligence for mergers and acquisitions,
though he would not reveal the name of his company or any further
details.
“I’m not going to
tell you because I don’t like journalists meddling in my private
business,” he said. “It can only cause problems when journalists start
meddling around in my employment situations and what I’m doing
businesswise, as I’ve learned.”
Wohl was raised and
still lives in Orange County, a politically conservative area of
Southern California, in a Republican home. His father, David Wohl, is an
attorney who has appeared on Fox News as a commentator and describes
himself as a campaign surrogate for Trump. Wohl has followed in his
father’s footsteps, appearing on Fox Business as early as 2015 to
discuss his hedge fund.
His political activism ramped up with the start
of Trump’s campaign in 2015, and since has skyrocketed. In addition to
his Twitter activity, Wohl writes pieces for the right-wing site The
Gateway Pundit, runs his own right-wing news site called The Washington Reporter
and co-hosts a podcast with the independent journalist Laura Loomer
called “2 Live Jew,” which is advertised as the “#1 Podcast for Jewish
Trump Supporters.” Episode titles have included “The Caliphate Comes to
Toronto” and “Full Commie.”
Loomer
boasts of “confronting public figures” in the style of Project Veritas,
the right-wing gotcha operation where she worked in 2016. Last month
she asked a Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who is Muslim
to “reconcile your own personal practice of Islamic law with your
Marxist socialist political platform that directly contradicts tenets
within Islamic law.”
“Laura is on the
cutting edge of stopping the Sharia invasion that’s happening in the
United States, the Islamification of neighborhoods,” Wohl said on a
recent podcast, referring to Islamic religious law. “They want Sharia
courts. This is what they’re calling for, this is their vision, is to
establish a caliphate in the West.”
Wohl said he agrees
with Trump “on 90 percent or 95 percent of his positions” — first and
foremost immigration. He said that “illegal immigration has just
devastated communities” in Southern California, something Wohl said he
realized when most of his second-grade class could not speak “a lick of
English.” He said that hindered his education.
“A wall would change a
lot about a lot of border states as far as public safety,” he said.
“What’s coming across our southern border is in many cases, not in all
cases, but in many cases tremendous crime.
“When Trump came down
the escalator and said ‘We’re going to build a great, great wall and
we’re going to make Mexico pay for that wall,’ he had my vote,” Wohl
said, referring to Trump’s campaign launch.
One of the issues on
which Wohl disagrees with Trump relates to Israel. Wohl would like to
see the president, who has been friendly to the Israeli government’s
agenda, take an even harder line against the Palestinian Authority,
which administers the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
“I would like to see
the Palestinian Authority defunded completely by the United States and
treated like ISIS or any other terrorist organization because that’s
what they are,” he said.
Wohl’s political
opinions are no less pointed on Twitter, where he focuses his commentary
on praising the president and opposing his opponents. Wohl said proudly
that Trump has retweeted him three times and replied to one of his
tweets, which he said is “a recognition that you’re doing something
right.”
Other tweeters have
enjoyed mocking Wohl for a curious trope he repeats: a contention that
he hears “coffee shop hipster liberals” praising the president. He has
said so six separate times.
I wanted to ask Wohl
about this surreptitiously pro-Trump hipster cafe. I also wanted to ask
him more about his Judaism, as well as his future plans. But he hung up
on me after I asked him a follow-up question about his claim that Puerto
Rico is socialist.
“You’ve got a terrible attitude,” he said before ending the call.
JTA
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