by Joshua Nelken-Zitser
Sep 20, 2024

Donald Trump suggested Jewish Americans would be partly to blame if he lost the election in November.

He made the comment at an event on fighting antisemitism and later at an Israeli-American summit.

The former president has repeatedly derided Jews who vote for Democratic candidates and not for him.

    Speaking at a "Fighting Antisemitism in America" event Thursday in Washington, DC, former President Donald Trump said that Jews would be partly to blame if he lost in November.

"If I don't win this election" then "the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss," Trump said, per The New York Times.

Trump attributed this to what he called the "Democrat hold or curse" on Jewish Americans, The Washington Post said.

The newspaper reported that at one point, Trump appeared to conflate Israel with American Jews when talking about Vice President Kamala Harris, saying: "Israel, I believe, has to defeat her."

Later, speaking at the Israeli-American Council national summit, CNN said that Trump again claimed that Jewish voters "would really have a lot to do with" his potential defeat.

The Times reported that Trump went on to say that Jews who vote for Harris would be "voting for the enemy" for what, he said, would be the eventual destruction of Israel.

The remarks echoed an oft-repeated sentiment by the former president, who has accused Jewish people in the US of disloyalty or a lack of intelligence for failing to support him, often while simultaneously highlighting his backing of Israel.

In April, Trump said that any Jew who was backing President Joe Biden — at the time the Democratic nominee — should have their "head examined." It was a phrase he repeated on Thursday.

A month earlier, Trump said that "any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion."

And in 2019, while president, Trump accused Jewish Democrats of "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty."

According to the American Jewish Committee, the "dual loyalty" trope is a harmful stereotype that accuses Jews of being more loyal to Israel than their own nations.

Trump's latest remarks came on the same day CNN published a bombshell report on North Carolina's Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, which claimed that in a porn forum, he had called himself a "black NAZI!" and expressed a preference for Adolf Hitler over former President Barack Obama.

Business Insider had previously reported on Robinson's history of antisemitic remarks.

Trump, who once praised Robinson as "Martin Luther King on steroids," made no mention of Robinson during either of his speeches, per the Times.