Donald Trump alleged Wednesday that Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, is not Jewish.
“Schumer is a Palestinian, as far as I’m concerned. You know, he’s become a Palestinian,” the president said in the Oval Office. “He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.”
But Schumer is Jewish, both ethnically and religiously, and he is not Palestinian. When he served as Senate majority leader until Jan. 3 this year, he was the highest-ranked Jewish politician in American history—and he is about to publish a memoir titled Antisemitism in America: A Warning.
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Trump did not explain what he meant during the press availability, and the White House did not immediately reply when asked for clarification.
The 74-year-old senior senator from New York has been a strong ally of Israel, though he has become a critic of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s retaliatory military action in Gaza.
Last March, Schumer said that by associating himself with Israel’s far right, Netanyahu had “lost his way” and “as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Schumer’s office for a response to Trump’s jab but has not yet heard back.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a progressive advocacy group, said that Trump’s remark was an attack on Jewish people.
“Again, the goal for this administration isn’t to counter antisemitism or protect Israel,” she wrote on X. “It’s to weaponize antisemitism to go after their political enemies, advance an extreme agenda, and undercut democracy — and it only makes Jews *less* safe.”
While Wednesday appeared to be the first time Trump has explicitly accused Schumer of not being Jewish, it is not the first time that he has tried to insult the Senate minority leader by questioning his identity.
In early February, Trump called Schumer Palestinian in a Truth Social post while doubling down on his push to relocate Gazans to “new and modern homes” elsewhere in the region.
“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities” if he had his way, Trump wrote.
After Schumer did not shake Netanyahu’s hand when he visited Congress this past August, Trump said at a campaign rally that he was “a proud member of Hamas” in addition to being “a Palestinian.”
Schumer fired back that “the lower [Trump] drops in polls, the more unhinged he becomes.”
A day before, Schumer had accused Trump of invoking an “old antisemitic trope” when he called Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, “a c--py Jew.”
In September, while speaking to a group of Jewish Republicans as he campaigned for president, Trump reiterated the brazen insult.
“Chuck Schumer is a Palestinian,” he said. “Who would have thought that was going to happen? What the hell happened to him?
“I saw him the other day, he was dressed in one of their robes,” Trump joked, before adding in a more serious tone: “Chuck Schumer is Hamas all the way.”
In the wake of the Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Schumer emerged as one of the loudest voices among American politicians against antisemitism.
“No matter what our beliefs are, no matter where we stand on the war in Gaza, all of us must condemn antisemitism with full-throated clarity whenever we see it before it metastasizes into something even worse,” Schumer said during a speech in November 2023. “Because right now, that’s what Jewish Americans fear most.”
Schumer has a forthcoming memoir, to be published on March 18, titled Antisemitism in America: A Warning.
The book “will engage with debates over the purpose and meaning of Israel, and help draw a line between legitimate criticism of its government and when criticism of Israel as a Jewish homeland verges into antisemitism,” according to a description from its publisher, Hachette Book Group. “This book is a warning, informed by the lessons of history, about what can happen when the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ is allowed to rise, unchecked.”
