President Donald Trump attracted well-earned criticism when he stacked stereotype on top of stereotype Saturday for a Jewish audience at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida. He painted Jewish people as money-hungry and opportunistic. "A lot of you are in the real estate business cuz I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all," he said, "but you have to vote for (me). You have no choice. You’re not going to vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that.”
Trump has repeatedly referred to Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” to mock her claimed Native American heritage. He used the stage to slam her again, as well as her proposed “ultra-millionaire tax,” which would apply an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion.
”You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away,” Trump said. “Even if you don’t like me, some of you don’t. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually, and you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it.”
The president went even further, dropping grave offenses disguised as casual jokes between friends. He said some Jewish Americans “don’t love Israel enough” in an attempt to brag about his administration’s relationship with Israel. And by relationship, I mean his overturning years of policy in the Middle East to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, flying in the face of many Palestinians, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
See, there’s what the president would call a ‘very big’ conflict going on between the Palestinian people and Israeli government. That conflict dates back to Israel's founding in 1948 and is as much religious as it is political, the Council reported. Many Palestinians (most of them Islamic) want to occupy at least part of (and in some cases all of) Jerusalem, but the mostly Jewish nation of Israel has controlled the city since 1967, according to NPR.
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Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the self-proclaimed proud granddaughter of a Palestinian woman, said Israel's nation-state law, “which states that only Jews have the right to self-determination, has eliminated the political rights of the Palestinian people and effectively made them second-class citizens.” She called for equality for Palestinians and black Israelis Friday.
The president, however, hoped to gain political points with his Jewish audience by relying on earlier anti-Semitic sentiments he expressed in August when he called Democratic Jewish voters “very disloyal to Israel.” In figuratively slapping the wrists of Jewish Americans who voted for Democrats under the administration of former President Barack Obama, Trump told the crowd: "So many of you voted for people in the last administration. Someday you'll have to explain that to me because I don't think they liked Israel too much."
Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, called the president’s remarks “deeply offensive” online Sunday. “We strongly denounce these vile and bigoted remarks in which the president – once again – used anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize Jews as driven by money and insufficiently loyal to Israel,” Soifer said in the web statement. “He even had the audacity to suggest that Jews ‘have no choice’ but to support him.”
“American Jews do have a choice, and they’re not choosing President Trump or the Republican Party, which has been complicit in enacting his hateful agenda,” Soiefer added.
This is all just an opportunity for a political win for Trump, who is hoping to again win more Electoral College votes than his opponent, this time in the 2020 presidential race, according to Al Jazeera.
While Jewish voters only represent a sliver of the electorate, in Florida they are “a crucial piece” of the electoral picture, the news channel reported.