The White House has criticized Donald Trump for “vile and unhinged antisemitic rhetoric” after the former president claimed that Jewish people who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and “hate their religion”.
In an interview on Monday Trump was asked about increased criticism by Democrats of Israel’s military action in Gaza, which has left more than 30,000 Palestinians dead.
“I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat party hates Israel,” Trump said.
He added: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
In a statement, the White House spokesman Andrew Bates said:
“President Biden has put his foot down when it comes to vile and unhinged antisemitic rhetoric. As antisemitic crimes and acts of hate have increased across the world – among them the deadliest attack committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust – leaders have an obligation to call hate what it is and bring Americans together against it.”
Bates referenced the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, after which Trump claimed had “very fine people on both sides”.
“Like President Biden said, he was moved to run for President when he saw neo-Nazis chanting ‘the same antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the 1930s’ in Charlottesville,” Bates said.
Trump made his comments about Jewish people in an interview with Sebastian Gorka, a former aide. The claims prompted an angry response from Democrats and others.
Kathy Manning, a Democratic congresswoman from North Carolina, told Axios that Trump’s claims were “particularly disgraceful and dangerous at a time when Jews are facing dangerous levels of antisemitism nationwide”.
Jamie Raskin, a congressman from Maryland, said Trump had committed an “outrageous slander against the vast majority of American Jews”.
“Luckily I don’t know any Jews who look to Donald Trump for advice on how to be Jewish,” Raskin said, according to an Axios report.
“After all, this is the guy who saw ‘very fine people on both sides’ of an antisemitic riot and entertained the neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes over at his house at Mar-a-Lago for dinner.”
In the interview with Gorka Trump also claimed that Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, was “very anti-Israel”.
Schumer responded in a post on X: “To make Israel a partisan issue only hurts Israel and the US-Israeli relationship. Trump is making highly partisan and hateful rants. I am working in a bipartisan way to ensure the US-Israeli relationship sustains for generations to come, buoyed by peace in the Middle East.”
Trump’s remarks came as a judge denied his attempt to prevent Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels from testifying in his upcoming trial over a hush-money payment made to Daniels, an adult film star, in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces 34 charges of falsifying business records related to his reimbursement of Cohen for the payment to Daniels, made to prevent her from discussing a sexual encounter she says she had in 2006.
He also filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News on Monday, in a further indication of how Trump’s life is increasingly consumed by litigation.
Lawyers for Trump filed the suit in a Florida court, claiming that George Stephanopoulos, an ABC News host, had damaged his reputation when he said on air that Trump had “been found liable” for rape, after Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing the magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.
The judge in that case found that Carroll’s claim Trump had raped her was “substantially true”.
