Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer criticized former President Donald Trump’s response to the New York Democrat’s speech on Israel, noting that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s remarks were “sick,” and “hateful,” and included antisemitic tropes.
“The former president’s comments were utterly disgusting and a textbook example of the kind of antisemitism facing Jews, pushing the dangerous antisemitism trope of dual loyalty,” Schumer said Tuesday.
The highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States continued, “To say you hate Israel or your religion because you have one political view over the other is sick. It’s hateful, it is unadulterated antisemitism, and it serves to use Israel as a political wedge further damaging the bonds between US and Israel.”
Trump was asked on a podcast hosted by his former White House aide Sebastian Gorka about criticism from the Biden administration and Schumer’s comments criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump said in the interview, which aired Monday. “I don’t think they hate him, I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat Party hates Israel.”
Trump directly slammed Schumer, who recently criticized Netanyahu’s government and called for new elections in a speech on the Senate floor about Israel’s war on Hamas and the resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“Don’t forget, when you see those Palestinian marches, even I, I’m amazed at how many people are in those marches. And guys like Schumer see that, and to him it’s votes, I think it’s votes more than anything else, because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now,” Trump said.
Members of the Senate Republican leadership team largely…
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