ADL condemns Trump’s anti-Semitic insults but fails to mention him by name | Donald Trump

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Tuesday denounced the use of the term “shylock” as anti-Semitic, without explaining that the insult had been used the day before by Donald Trump in a speech in Kansas.

Trump used the slur at a rally Monday night in support of Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who is engaged in a tighter-than-expected re-election fight against his Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. Marshall, a doctor, was criticized for filing lawsuits against more than 700 patients with unpaid bills, leading to the arrest of 18 of them.

Trump said Marshall’s criticism, by highlighting patient trials in campaign ads, “made it seem like he was some kind of shylock guy.”

Trump also falsely claimed that Marshall was “mandated by law” to “go after these people.”

The ADL’s brief social media post made no mention of Trump. The organization, founded to combat anti-Semitism, has provided no explanation as to why it found it necessary to explain that anyone who equates a miserly person with Shylock, the evil Jewish moneylender from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, is using an anti-Semitic trope.

“The term ‘Shylock’ is rooted in a long-standing anti-Semitic stereotype,” the ADL posted on X, but not on its other social media accounts. “Whatever the intention, its use can reinforce harmful stereotypes about Jews and normalize language that has long been used to target the Jewish community. »

Critics who accuse the ADL of using accusations of anti-Semitism selectively, to attack people critical of Israel, have suggested that the American Jewish civil rights group is going soft on Trump because of his support for Israel.

Trump’s insult came just a day after he endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the country’s election.

Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, America’s most prominent Jewish politician, responded to the ADL’s failure to mention Trump by suggesting that his president would have been more blunt if someone else had used the slur.

“If a Democrat said it, Jonathan Greenblatt (the CEO of the ADL) would knock people down to condemn them by name on camera, but it was Trump, so it’s just a PSA,” Duss wrote.

In 2014, after then-Vice President Joe Biden called people who financially benefit from the U.S. military “shylocks,” the national director of the Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology and called the remarks a “teachable moment.”

Trump previously used the slur at a 2025 rally in Iowa. The US president told supporters that removing taxes on inherited family farms would save farmers “from going to banks and borrowing, in some cases from a good banker, and in other cases from shylocks and bad people.”

The day after that Iowa rally, the ADL called the president’s use of the term “very troubling and irresponsible,” but Trump claimed ignorance when asked by a reporter if he had intended to use the word “shylocks” to refer to Jews.

“No, I never heard it that way,” Trump then replied. “To me, a shylock is someone who is, uh, a high rate lender. I’ve never heard it that way. You see it differently than I do. I’ve never heard that.”