A Jewish Republican congressman whom Donald Trump appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council compared Trump and his running mate JD Vance’s extremist attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during last year’s presidential campaign to the “‘target[ing]’ of Jews”, a new book reports.

After Trump endured a difficult debate against Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on 10 September – attracting widespread ridicule for his claim that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets – the former president “was determined to campaign in Springfield”, the Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt writes.

“A group of Ohio congressmen – including Max Miller, a former White House aide who had won his seat with Trump’s backing – was pleading with Trump and his campaign not to go, arguing it would be a political disaster.

“Miller, whom Trump had appointed to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, was privately infuriated. He was uncomfortable with where the campaign was heading, having privately lobbied Trump against picking Vance for VP. During a private discussion with a fellow Jewish Republican, he likened the attacks on Haitians to the ‘target[ing]’ of Jews.”

Miller’s worries are described in Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, which will be published next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Isenstadt’s fast-paced book has been widely trailed, generating headlines including “Exclusive: Inside Trump’s Iran fear”, “Trump camp was fed questions for Fox News town hall” and “‘The Most American Picture I’ve Ever Seen’: Inside Donald Trump’s Hospital Room After Assassination Attempt”.

But news of a Jewish congressman and US Holocaust Memorial Council member’s alarm at Trump and Vance’s targeting of Haitians, because he detected echoes of antisemitic invective, may cause the White House new embarrassment.

Claims or echoes of antisemitism are hugely sensitive across US politics. Another new book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, by Michael Wolff, contains the startling claim that Trump’s own daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who are Jewish, refused to sign a statement saying Donald Trump was not antisemitic.

Kushner denied Wolff’s report, which the author said described events in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel of 7 October 2023.

As Isenstadt’s book appears, the Trump administration is stirring huge controversy over the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student involved in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in New York.

Khalil is a legal permanent resident married to a US citizen and has not been charged with a crime, but is reportedly being held under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to expel those believed to pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”.

On Monday, Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group, said immigration enforcement officers “abducted” Khalil “in the false name of Jewish safety”.

Bend the Arc’s chief executive, Jamie Beran, said: “The White House’s authoritarian actions are … preying on legitimate Jewish fear about antisemitism. But this administration, which endangers Jewish life with Nazi salutes and its ties to the white nationalist movement, does not speak for us.”

Beran was referring to controversy over Nazi-style salutes recently given by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a key Trump backer, and by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and chief White House strategist.

Trump and Vance’s attacks on Haitians in Ohio were part of a campaign marked by incendiary rhetoric about race and immigration, culminating in late October in a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. Democrats projected on to the venue messages tying Trump to Adolf Hitler, a comparison once made but since disavowed by Vance himself. One message read, “Trump praised Hitler” – a claim by the former White House chief of staff John Kelly that Trump denies.

At the rally, a comedian repeated Trump’s false debate-stage claim that Haitians in Springfield were “eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating pets of the people that live there”.

Stories of pets being eaten in Ohio reportedly originated in false claims on social media. After the Trump-Harris debate, one woman who posted on Facebook that a neighbor told her Haitians ate her cat told NBC News “it exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen” and said through tears: “I’m not a racist.”

Regardless, Trump and Vance repeated the claim, even as authorities in Ohio reported a proliferation of bomb threats to schools, hospitals and government buildings, inspired by lies about Haitians in Springfield, and implemented increased security measures.

As reported by Isenstadt, Miller and other, unnamed Ohio congressmen who “pleaded” with Trump not to come to Springfield were ultimately successful.

Trump’s “lieutenants”, Isenstadt writes, “agreed among themselves a Springfield trip couldn’t happen, and they eventually got it killed. As a compromise, they told Trump he would instead campaign in a pair of communities in Wisconsin and Colorado he had also cast as war zones overrun with illegal immigrants. Trump was sated.”

Trump spoke in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and Aurora, Colorado, communities targeted by Republicans with anti-immigration invective.

Haitian migrants in Springfield are legally in the US. However, the Trump administration has revoked temporary protected status for Haitians, which will now end in August. A lawsuit has been lodged.

Isenstadt also writes that Trump rejected the analysis of his advisers and the overwhelming tenor of punditry and polling, to insist he won the debate against Harris.

Most people thought Trump’s claim about Haitians in Springfield eating pets was the low point of a bad night for the then candidate, particularly given he was instantly factchecked by the debate moderators from ABC.

“They’re giving the wrong analysis,” Trump reportedly insisted. “I won that debate.”

Two months later, after a campaign frequently dominated by extremist rhetoric, he won back the White House.