Trump says Kamala Harris 'doesn’t like Jewish people' — sticking to a pattern
Former President Donald Trump said in a radio interview on Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people,” despite the fact that her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.
“Number one, she doesn’t like Israel,” Trump said of Harris on the WABC radio program “Sid & Friends in the Morning.” “Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it, and nobody wants to say it.”
An ardent Trump supporter, the show’s host, Sid Rosenberg, then disparaged Emhoff.
“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish, are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew. He’s a horrible Jew.”
As he has for years, Trump said in the interview that Jews in the United States should only be voting for Republicans.
“If you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool, an absolute fool,” Trump said.
In the 2020 presidential election, roughly seven in 10 American Jews voted for Joe Biden, according to the Pew Research Center.
A pattern emerges
Last week, after he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago home and country club in Florida, Trump made similar remarks about the political views he believed Jews should hold.
"Any Jewish person who votes for Kamala, or a Democrat, should immediately have their head examined,” he said.
After Harris, like many Democrats, skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress last week to attend a campaign event in Indianapolis, Trump was quick to offer his explanation as to her real motive.
"She doesn't like Jewish people. She doesn't like Israel. That's the way it is, and that's the way it's always going to be. She's not going to change," he said.
In April, before President Biden had exited the race, Trump reiterated his view about Jews voting for Democrats.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel and, frankly, should be spoken to,” Trump said.
A month earlier, Trump sat for an interview with hard-right radio host Sebastian Gorka, who served as a White House aide to Trump. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Trump said, adding, “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed.”
Those comments drew a rebuke from Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League. "Accusing Jews of hating their religion because they might vote for a particular party is defamatory & patently false," Greenblatt wrote in a post on X.
When he was president, Trump also regularly cast himself as Israel’s greatest defender. In a 2019 speech to the Israeli-American Council National Summit, he expressed dismay that American Jews had voted for Obama.
“So many of you voted for people in the last administration,” Trump said. “Someday you’ll have to explain that to me because I don’t think they like Israel too much.”
Dinner guests and ‘both sides’
Trump’s regular insistence that American Jews show allegiance to him and the Republican Party has become a campaign issue in 2024, especially following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel that killed 1,139 people and Israel’s military response in Gaza that has left 39,300 dead. But those assertions have been undercut by his own past actions and statements.
In 2022, for instance, Trump hosted white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Feuntes and rabidly antisemitic rapper Kanye West for dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
In 2017, when white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, self-described neo-Nazis marched, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Violent clashes ensued with counterprotesters, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.
Trump’s initial response to that incident remains, while calling out “neo-Nazis and the white nationalists,” seemed to many observers to do just that when he began by noting that "you also had some very fine people on both sides."
