Trump says Jewish voters would be partly to blame if he loses election | 2024 US Election News
The Republican candidate again claims that Israel would likely cease to exist within two years if the Democrats win.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said American Jewish voters will be partly to blame if he loses the November election.
The former president lamented that he lags behind his Democratic Party rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, among American Jews while addressing the Israeli-American Council’s national summit in Washington, DC.
“If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would have a lot to do with it if that happened, because if 40%, I mean 60% of the people vote for the enemy – Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years,” Trump said Thursday.
Jews were partly responsible for the outcome of the November 5 presidential election, Trump claimed, saying they tend to vote for Democrats.
He cited an anonymous poll that he said showed Harris winning 60 percent of the vote among American Jews.
The former president prides himself on his close ties to Israel and the Jewish community, and on having played a key role in moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
At a second event in the U.S. capital focused on denouncing anti-Semitism in the country, Trump said the Democratic Party had a “hold, or a curse” on American Jews and should get “100 percent” of the Jewish vote because of its policies on Israel.
“My promise to American Jews is this: With your vote, I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend that American Jews have ever had in the White House,” Trump said at the donor event. “But in all honesty, I already am.”
Jewish voters in the United States have overwhelmingly leaned toward Democrats in federal elections for decades and continue to do so. But a slight shift in that vote could determine the winner in November.
The Trump campaign has made winning over Jewish voters in key states a priority.
In Pennsylvania, for example, there are more than 400,000 Jews, in a state that Joe Biden won by 81,000 votes in 2020.
In a statement before the speech, Harris campaign spokeswoman Morgan Finkelstein criticized Trump for his occasional associations with anti-Semites.
Trump has rejected accusations of anti-Semitism, saying he has a Jewish son-in-law.
In his comments, Trump also failed to address a CNN report earlier in the day about North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson once calling himself a “black NAZI” in a post on a pornography forum.
Robinson has pledged to stay in the race despite the report, and the Trump campaign appears to be distancing itself from the candidate while still calling the swing state a key to winning back the White House.
