Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign hit back at Donald Trump Tuesday night after he told a radio host the vice president “doesn’t like Jewish people”—even though the vice president is married to one.
He also seemingly agreed when the host called Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump appeared on Sid & Friends, a New York-based talk radio show, where he condemned Jews who vote for Democratic candidates as “absolute fool[s].”
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“No. 1, she doesn’t like Israel,” Trump said. “No. 2, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”
The show’s host, Sid Rosenberg, took the sentiment one step further.
“Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew. He’s a horrible Jew.”
On the audio, Trump says “yes” twice during Rosenberg’s rant about Emhoff.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the Harris campaign called Trump “hateful” and “despicable,” and the comments “disgusting” and “below the dignity of anyone.”
“Donald Trump thinks he can score points with Jewish voters by denigrating them. He is wrong,” the campaign wrote.
Trump has used this line of attack against Jewish Democrats in the past, and has recently begun targeting the vice president with similar rhetoric. At a rally on July 24 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Trump claimed Harris was “totally against the Jewish people.”
Jewish voters have historically voted for Democrats in past elections. A Pew Center study published after the 2020 presidential election found that 71% of Jewish voters still identified with the Democratic Party. Roughly 50% of Jews identified as liberal, compared to 32% who identified as moderate and only 16% who identified as conservative. About 73% of those voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance after his first term as president.
Support for both the Republican Party and former President Trump did rise sharply among Orthodox Jews surveyed, the research found, who make up about 1 in 10 Jewish voters in the U.S.
