Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in the history of the U.S. Congress. It’s long been a point of pride for the New York Democrat, whose new book on antisemitism in America will soon hit shelves.
It’s too late for the senator to add a few pages about Donald Trump’s latest comments, though I suspect Schumer might be tempted.
Across much of 2024, Trump repeatedly referred to the longtime senator as “a Palestinian” — using the label as a slur — even going so far as to claim publicly, and falsely, that Schumer is aligned with Hamas.
It was ugly and offensive rhetoric, even by Trump standards, and it was apparently motivated by the fact that the senator does not agree entirely with the Republican on U.S. policy toward Israel. But in 2025, the president has taken this in an even more repulsive direction. The Washington Post reported:
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office alongside Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, Trump attacked the Democrats over their response during his address to Congress on March 6 and targeted Schumer when he was asked about corporate taxes. ‘Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian,’ Trump said.
Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that it’s takes a special kind of political talent to offend Jews and Palestinians at the same time, over the course of a few seconds, but the president apparently managed to pull it off.
Trump: "Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-03-12T17:11:04.101Z
But the closer one looks, the more abhorrent the comment becomes. Trump has apparently convinced himself that he — a Christian — is qualified to serve as an arbiter of who is and is not Jewish. The American presidency is powerful, but it does not include the power to issue public declarations on the scope of another person’s Jewishness.
Whether the Republican realizes this or not, there’s an inherent antisemitism in rhetoric like this. It is simply not up to Trump to decide who the “real” Jews are based on his personal whims or officials’ willingness to go along with his agenda.
What’s more, incidents like this are part of a larger pattern. It was just last fall, for example, when Trump publicly suggested that he intended to blame Jews, at least in part, if he lost the 2024 race. 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, the former president 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.
As regular readers might recall, it was earlier in the year when Trump also invoked the familiar “dual loyalty” trope by claiming that Jewish voters who support Democrats hate Israel.
Indeed, he’s been at this for a while. During his 2016 campaign, the future president spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, “You’re not gonna 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.” While in office, he also used some highly provocative rhetoric about Jews and what he expected of their “loyalties.” Trump 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. There was also his ugly reaction to a racist event in Charlottesville in 2017, in response to torch-wielding bigots chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” 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 so confusing is a mystery. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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