President Donald Trump told a Kansas campaign rally on Monday that Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) was wrongly portrayed as a “shylock” over his past medical practice billing, the second time in as many years that Trump has used the antisemitic slur.
Trump made the remark while campaigning for Marshall at a Monday rally in Park City, Kansas.
“He was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients,” Trump said of the one-term senator. “You’re not allowed not to do it. You have to, by law, go after those people, and they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a shylock-type guy.”
“And if he didn’t make these requests, he would be breaking the law,” the president added. “He would have been breaking a very strong criminal law, and he would be subject to criminal arrest and liability.”
The anecdote appeared to reference a New York Times article that stated Marshall and his former medical practice sued more than 700 patients for unpaid medical bills before he entered the Senate.
While telling the story before a packed crowd, Trump said he probably shouldn’t have said it. “But that’s the way it is, Roger,” he continued. “I have to tell it like it is. You got screwed with that stuff.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has used the antisemitic slur. During an Iowa rally last July, he called predatory lenders “shylocks and bad people” who charged families high interest.
The term originates from William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, in which a Jewish character named Shylock is a malicious moneylender. The word is often interpreted as an antisemitic slur.
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The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, has said the term “evokes a centuries-old antisemitic trope about Jews and greed that is extremely offensive and dangerous” and called Trump’s use of the term last summer “very troubling and irresponsible.”
Trump said at the time that he never heard that the term was antisemitic and that he understood it to mean “somebody that’s a moneylender at high rates.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
