Trump calls Schumer a Palestinian

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US Muslim and Jewish advocacy groups criticized US President Donald Trump on Wednesday for referring to the top Senate Democrat, Senator Chuck Schumer, as a “Palestinian,” with the organizations saying the president used the term as a slur.

Trump, a Republican, was asked by reporters at the White House about US corporate tax rate policy during an Oval Office meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and in response expressed displeasure with congressional Democrats not supporting his agenda. The Irish government is staunchly pro-Palestinian.

“Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian,” Trump said apparently suggesting the veteran New York lawmaker has become too critical of Israel.

President Trump’s use of the term ‘Palestinian’ as a racial slur is offensive and beneath the dignity of his office,” said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Awad, who is of Palestinian heritage, said Trump’s comments showed the “continuing dehumanization” of Palestinians.

Jewish groups panned the remarks with some saying they amounted to antisemitism.

“Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide who is Jewish,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, posted to X. “‘Palestinian’ should not be used as an insult. These comments are abhorrent but revealing of why the vast majority of Jewish voters have not and will never support Donald Trump.”

Trump’s attack on Schumer is antisemitic and racist,” said Jonathan Jacoby, who leads the Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog. “He’s policing Jewish identity, invoking the dual loyalty trope, and implying Palestinians are evil. This is dangerous incitement. Jewish groups must say it clearly: the President is spreading hate and weaponizing antisemitism.”

Progressive Zionist group New Jewish Narrative, meanwhile, called the remark “absurd and offensive.”

The group added, “Schumer is Jewish, regardless of his views on Israel-Palestine or anything else. And ‘Palestinian’ is not a slur. To use it as such is pure racism.”

The Anti-Defamation League also condemned the comments, saying in a statement, “A President has many powers, but none of them include deciding who is and isn’t Jewish. Doing so, and using ‘Palestinian’ as a slur, are both beneath any POTUS. Instead of weaponizing people’s identity, use the power of the bully pulpit to bring the American people together.”

Trump’s comments also drew some praise. David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, tweeted the remark and wrote, “Metaphorically speaking, I couldn’t have said it better.”

Generally, Trump has opted for such language to disparage Democrats whom he sees as inadequately supportive of Israel.

In this case, however, Trump made the comments while talking about corporate tax rates. After saying that the American public will blame Democrats for high taxes, Trump launched into an aside on the New York senator, his top adversary in Congress who on Wednesday was opposing a Republican-drafted funding bill.

Trump has previously denied allegations of being discriminatory and antisemitic. The White House and Schumer had no immediate comment.

Both Trump’s supporters and opponents shared clips of the remark online.

Wednesday’s remarks were the latest instance in which Trump has used “Palestinian” as an epithet to refer to Schumer, whom he once also falsely called “a proud member of Hamas.”

Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has spoken frequently about his Jewish identity throughout his political career. He is soon to release a book about fighting antisemitism.

Trump faced criticism from rights groups during last year’s election campaign in which he referred to former US president Joe Biden as Palestinian during a presidential debate. Trump also said last year that Jews who did not vote for him needed to “have your head examined.”

The Trump administration has touted its controversial moves to punish Columbia University for tolerating aggressive pro-Palestinian protests on campus and to deport Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding immigrant prominently involved in those protests, as evidence of its commitment to combating antisemitism. While these steps have rightly raised free speech concerns, the hypocrisy of the administration’s professed vigilance against anti-Jewish bigotry is also worth noting, given its disturbing friendliness to some odious Jew-haters on the right.

The most recent example involves an actual administration official, Pentagon deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson. Wilson, 26, previously worked on Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and at a leading pro-Trump think tank. Earlier this month, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other media outlets published reports on Wilson’s shocking history of antisemitic social media posts.

In 2023 and 2024, Wilson posted attacks on Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in Georgia in 1915 after being convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in a trial widely regarded as marred by grotesque antisemitism; Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986. Claims that Frank was guilty and that the crime was a ritual murder have circulated widely on the antisemitic fringe.

Other Wilson posts have promoted Christian nationalism and praised Germany’s far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party, whose rhetoric has flirted with Nazi apologism and neo-Nazi slogans. She has even mocked Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for going to Columbia University to show support for Jewish students who said the pro-Palestinian protests were rife with anti-Jewish harassment.

Several conservative commentators have expressed dismay at Wilson’s bigotry and called for her firing. Neither the Department of Defense nor the White House acknowledged these concerns.

Another controversy erupted around reports that administration officials, including Trump special envoy Richard Grenell, intervened on behalf of social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who are facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania, to secure their return to the United States pending trial. Andrew Tate, whose former attorney and outspoken admirer Paul Ingrassia is currently the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, is notorious primarily for his toxic misogyny. But he has peddled equally toxic antisemitism, praising Hamas for its "masculine spirit of resistance" and questioning World War II narratives that portray the Nazis as villains.

None of this should be surprising, considering that Trump’s dalliance with far-right antisemites goes back to his 2016 campaign when a substantial contingent of his online troops came from the racist "alternative right." Since then, that loathsome movement has largely vanished from the scene, but its hateful ideology has infiltrated the more mainstream right to an alarming degree: Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host and now a hugely popular podcaster who played a prominent role in Trump’s presidential campaign last year, has been peddling barely veiled white nationalism as well as antisemitic tropes that portray Jews as interlopers with no loyalty to America. He has also platformed antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

Trump himself claims to be a staunch supporter of Israel and Jews — but he has also repeatedly singled out Jews for particularly nasty attacks, essentially accusing them of being bad Jews. This week, he remarked that New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was "not Jewish anymore" and had become "a Palestinian." In 2022, Trump hosted noted antisemites Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left is a real problem. But American Jews are ill-served by false friends like the Trump administration.

Just as one thinks Trump can't sink any lower he demonstrates there's a way to go yet.

For the Palestinians who voted for trump, let me define the concept of Karma...
Karma describes the relationship between a person's actions (both physical and mental) and the consequences that follow.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9eddnnq4go

You reap what you sow.

And Harris would have been better? She was part of the administration that's not just turning a blind eye to it, but was providing weapons well past the point where the world knew what was going on.

That's what gets me, people act like electing a Democrat would have been significantly better and while there are some that would have at a bare minimum cut off the weapons, the ones we had on offer are zionists.

If my memory serves me correctly large numbers of Arab Americans made quite a big deal of being pro-trump
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... can-voters

and (yes) in order to punish the Harris/Biden administration. their role in swinging Michigan and other states to red is now well known.

I imagine they wish they were either quieter and less public over their support for Netanyahu's best friend or (if they had any brains) just chosen to not vote. But African Americans have suspected for some time other things swayed arabs to vote trump, many AAs chose to march in solidarity with pro-Palestine protesters but conversely Arab Americans have no interest in African American issues. Most run small businesses and have traditionally voted republican.

It was a minor part of Trump's win. A much bigger part was the failure of Harris to stick to a message or direct any meaningful amount of messaging at working class men. The only ads I saw were hitting me up for money or imploring me to vote for her due to what could happen to others. That's no way to earn votes.

Yes I suppose that's the purpose of casting a ballot. Favouring one side and/or punishing the other. Harris ultimately was facing a credibility battle with voter perceptions being corrupted over her ties with the Biden administration, her past history linking her with railroading black criminal suspects, her links to Willie Brown and her poor performance as a past presidential candidate. She has a tremendous skills in legal debates (she literally eviscerated Supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh) but her public speaking and political debating leaves one with the impression she lacks a coherent message.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that she got kind of screwed over and that if she had been forced to compete in proper competitive primaries like the VP generally does when the President isn't seeking reelection that message may have been found. Or, we may have had a stronger candidate. But, it's never sat right with me that she got to be the VP and then the nominee despite not bringing anything particular to the ticket that other options couldn't have brought.

That being said, she kind of screwed herself over by not getting together with the cabinet and threatening to have Biden removed from office on the basis of competency if he refused to not seek reelection. I can't fathom how she thought he'd be good for another 4 years when he was that badly impaired.

^^^ I agree, she probably should have turned down the offer and bided her time, built up her reputation and then come back fresh in 2029.

Well we can safely assume they backed the wrong horse with this current US administration.