Trump vows to ‘remove the Jew haters’ if reelected during event commemorating October 7 attacks
By Kate Sullivan, CNN
(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump said Monday he would “remove the Jew haters” if reelected, speaking at an event commemorating the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.
“I will defend our American Jewish population. I will protect your communities, your schools, your places of worship and your values. We will remove the jihadist sympathizers and Jew haters. We’re going to remove the Jew haters who do nothing to help our country, they only want to destroy our country,” he said during the event at his golf course in Doral, Florida.
The former president did not specify exactly whom he considered to be “Jew haters.” The remarks came as Trump marked the anniversary of the terror attacks, saying October 7 was the “deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
Trump claimed “anti-Jewish hatred” was “within the ranks of the Democrat Party.” Trump has repeatedly claimed that Jewish Democrats should “have their heads examined,” playing into an antisemitic trope that Jewish Americans have dual loyalties to Israel and the US.
“The anti-Jewish hatred has returned even here in America, in our streets, our media and our college campuses and within the ranks of the Democrat Party, in particular, not in the Republican Party. I will tell you that it’s not in the Republican Party,” the former president added.
One of the promises in the preamble to the GOP platform adopted at the Republican National Convention in July is to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.”
Amid protests on college campuses across the country earlier this year, the former president repeatedly criticized the protesters and the Biden administration’s response. In April, he claimed without evidence he thought a lot of them were “paid” and “professional” agitators.
At the October 7 commemoration event, Trump said, “The bond between the United States and Israel is strong and enduring … if and when I’m president of the United States, it will, once again, be stronger and closer than it ever was before. We have to win this election. If we don’t win this election, there’s tremendous consequence for everything.”
The former president said at an event last month that he had not been “treated properly by voters who happen to be Jewish” during the 2020 election and said Jewish voters would hold some responsibility if he is defeated this year, while touting his record on Israel.
Trump has long played into antisemitic tropes, lashing out at Jewish Americans he says don’t support him enough. During his first campaign for president, he delivered a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition that was rife with antisemitic stereotypes, and shortly after he left office in 2021, he told reporters that Jewish Americans have turned their back on Israel. In an interview in March, Trump said that any Jewish person who votes for Democrats “hates their religion” and hates “everything about Israel.”
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