Sen. Roger Marshall’s re-election campaign is struggling for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest problems for the Kansas Republican is the recent reporting on how he treated patients who couldn’t afford their bills during his time in private practice.

That Donald Trump is trying to defend his loyal congressional ally is not surprising. What’s notable, however, is how the president is rallying to the senator’s defense.

At a campaign rally in Kansas, Trump acknowledged the controversy but said news organizations had been unfair to the senator, since Marshall was “mandated by law” to “go after those people.” That wasn’t even close to being true — there was no legal requirement for Marshall to garnish paychecks, seek arrest warrants or charge punitive interest rates — although the president didn’t stop there.

“They made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy,” the president said.

As NBC News reported, the word is widely recognized as “an antisemitic slur.”

In fairness, one might note that, in 2014, then-Vice Presiden Joe Biden used the same word, though the Delaware Democrat apologized shortly after.

Trump, in contrast, has publicly used the word more than once, and he has never apologized.

Making matters worse is the broader pattern, which makes it impossible to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Last year, for example, the Republican president declared that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in the history of the U.S. Congress, is “not Jewish anymore” because the New York Democrat opposed the White House’s foreign policy agenda.

The inherent antisemitism was unavoidable. It’s not up to Trump to declare himself the arbiter of who the “real” Jews are based on his personal whims or any officials’ willingness to go along with his policies.

A year earlier, as the 2024 race neared its end, Trump publicly suggested that he intended to blame Jews, at least in part, if he lost. A month earlier, after seeing Gov. Josh Shapiro’s remarks at the Democratic National Convention, the former president decided to take a rhetorical shot at his critic. The Pennsylvania Democrat, Trump wrote online, is a “highly overrated Jewish Governor.” In context, there was no reason for the Republican to reference Shapiro’s faith. Trump did it anyway.

Months earlier, he similarly invoked the familiar “dual loyalty” trope by claiming that Jewish voters who support Democrats hate Israel.

All of this was offensive but familiar. During his 2016 campaign, the future president spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians.” He added, “I’m a negotiator — like you folks.”

Several months later, in the run-up to Election Day 2016, the Republican promoted antisemitic imagery on social media. In the closing days of the campaign, Trump again faced accusations of antisemitism, claiming Hillary Clinton met “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

During his first term, Trump continued to use highly provocative rhetoric about Jews and what he expected of their “loyalties.” In 2019, he spoke at the Israeli American Council’s national summit, where he suggested Jewish people are primarily focused on wealth, which is why he expected them to support his re-election campaign.

After his 2020 defeat, Trump kept this going, whining that Jewish voters “don’t love Israel enough,” dining with prominent antisemites at Mar-a-Lago, and arguing that Jews need to “get their act together” and “appreciate” Israel “before it is too late.”

In late 2022, he went so far as to declare that Jewish leaders “should be ashamed of themselves” over their “lack of loyalty.”

Trump occasionally expresses bewilderment over his lack of support among Jewish voters. Why he finds this confusing is a mystery.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump’s latest example of antisemitic rhetoric was hardly his first appeared first on MS NOW.

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