Trump responds to criticism after use of 'anti-Semitic term'
He sparked outrage over his use of 'shylocks,' which refers to loan sharks and is considered offensive, playing on stereotypes of Jews and money. Trump said he had never heard it used that way. 'I've never heard it that way,' he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews after his rally. 'The meaning of Shylock is somebody that's a money lender at high rates. You view it differently. I've never heard that.'
Shylock is a Jewish character in William Shakespeare's play 'The Merchant of Venice.' He is portrayed as a villain and demands a 'pound of flesh' from another character who is unable to repay a loan. Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, slammed Trump for using an 'anti-Semitic stereotype.'
'Shylock is among the most quintessential antisemitic stereotypes. This is not an accident. It follows years in which Trump has normalized antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories — and it's deeply dangerous,' she wrote on social media. Trump has been accused of anti-Semitism but he is also close to the Jewish people. His daughter Ivanka converted to Jewish with her marriage to Jared Kushner. They are raising their children as Jewish.
The president also has signed executive orders combating antisemitism and cracked down on universities that allowed pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses. Before his rally he met with Edan Alexander, an Israeli-American who was held hostage during the Gaza war.
And, on Monday, he will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to push for an end to the war in Gaza. Trump is not the only politician to have used the word.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden used it in a 2014 speech while discussing his son's experience serving in Iraq and meeting members of the military who were in need of legal help because of problems back at home.
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The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Who's really to blame for Labour's troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM?
She is not the first chancellor to cry in public, and may not be the last. But Rachel Reeves is the first whose tears have moved markets. No sooner had the realisation dawned that she was silently weeping – over a personal sorrow she won't be pushed into revealing, she insisted later, not a political one – as she sat beside Keir Starmer at Wednesday's prime minister's questions, than the pound was dropping and the cost of borrowing rising. The bond traders who forced out Liz Truss's hapless chancellor still clearly rate her judgment and want her to stay, even if (perhaps especially if) some Labour MPs don't. Yet it is an extraordinary thing to live with the knowledge that a moment's uncontrolled emotion can drive up the cost of a nation's mortgages, just as a misjudged stroke of the budget pen can destroy lives. The most striking thing about her tears, however, was Starmer's failure to notice. Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it's the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government. Quite aside from whatever private grief she is now carrying, Reeves has for years been shouldering an exhausting load. From the start, she and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, did an unusual amount of the heavy lifting on behalf of their oddly apolitical leader – and in government the stakes have only risen. McSweeney, a natural fixer now jammed faintly awkwardly into a strategist's role, was once credited with near-mythical influence over Starmer, but for months is said to have been struggling at times to get the boss's ear. Reeves, meanwhile, has ended up by default running much of the domestic agenda, while Starmer focuses on foreign policy crises and a handful of big issues that passionately exercise him. Since even close aides and ministers complain of never really knowing what he wants, the result is a Treasury-brained government that tends to start with the numbers and work back to what's possible, rather than setting a political goal and figuring out how to reach it. Perhaps that makes sense to the City, but not to Labour MPs frogmarched through a series of politically toxic decisions with no obvious rationale except that the money's got to come from somewhere. To many of them, Starmer appears at best like a kind of political weekend dad: largely absent from everyday life and reluctant to get involved in political battles, but swooping in at the last minute to issue orders. Complaints of Downing Street dysfunction have been a staple under at least the last four prime ministers, but there's a weakness at the core of this No 10 that is putting the rest of government under undue strain, like a runner trying to push on through an injury who ends up pulling every other muscle in the process. On the left, there is growing talk of trying to force a 'reset' in spring, if next year's Scottish and Welsh elections go as badly as they assume: force Reeves out, let radicalism in, fight Reform's emotive rightwing fire with a form of leftwing populism perhaps loosely resembling what the Democrats' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are doing in the US. 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It's everything a Labour government exists to do, but as with so many unseen good things happening – on green energy, say, or transport – the money didn't fall from the sky and won't be there in future if an ageing and chronically unfit population carries on consuming welfare spending or health spending (the next big battleground, judging by the detail of Wes Streeting's 10-year plan) at current rates. To a frustrated Treasury, this week's rebellion was evidence that Labour MPs don't live in the real world, where hard choices must be faced for good things to happen. But, to the rebels, it's evidence that the Treasury doesn't live in their real world, where vulnerable people struggle with deep-rooted health problems only aggravated by being pushed into poverty, and the Greens as much as Reform are threatening to eat them for breakfast over it. There is some truth in both arguments. But that's precisely why it is ultimately a prime minister's job, and nobody else's, to draw all the threads of the government together: to balance political yin against economic yang, such that neither dominates or bends the project out of shape. Chancellors come and, eventually, even the best go. But sometimes it's only then that you can really tell whether the problem was ever really the chancellor. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump: I'll spare undocumented farm workers if bosses can vouch for them
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The Guardian
33 minutes ago
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