Trump accused of pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes in controversial speech to Israeli American Council

(Image credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

last updated 8 December 2019

President Trump may have gotten a good response from his audience, but his latest speech offended many others.

Trump delivered a 45-minute speech to the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, on Saturday evening. Trump spoke about his administration's decisions to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2017, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and eliminate funding for the Palestinian Authority as he urged those in attendance to vote for him while he runs for a second term in the Oval Office. Trump was reportedly regularly interrupted by the crowd's chants of "four more years" during the speech.

But the speech was not without controversy, with several observers noting that his words played into anti-Semitic tropes about wealth and loyalty, Haaretz reports. During the speech, Trump said there are Jewish people in the U.S. who don't love Israel enough, and added that if someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gets elected to the presidency, instead, the people in the room would "be out of business in 15 minutes."

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.