Source: Kent Nishimura / Getty
As Ye fka Kanye West is still being taken to task for his antisemitic rants, he’s got one person firmly in his corner – former president Donald Trump.
In a recent interview, Donald Trump was asked about the rapper’s offensive remarks which targeted Jewish people including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “He was really nice to me. Beyond anybody, he was,” he said to right-wing host Larry O’Connor. “I’ve always gotten along with him. He was really high on a guy named Donald Trump,” he continued.
O’Connor, a commentator for Salem News, pressed Trump about West’s comments on Kushner. “He’s been saying some really offensive things lately about your own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and about Jewish people. Jewish Americans writ large. Could you react to that? Because is this the guy that you knew?”
Trump avoided answering in a convoluted way. “So I don’t really know what statements he made. Sometimes he’ll make a statement and a lot of people will think it’s worse [than] he means it to be. But I think that you know, I was certainly very, you know, what I’m talking about.” It is a bit of a reversal from his previous stance on the “Flashing Lights” rapper.
West’s latest insulting remarks about Jewish people and Kushner came in an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson where he alleged that Kushner’s role in brokering peace agreements between Israel and other Arab nations in the Abraham Accords of 2020 was all an attempt “to get money.” It follows an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s new show on NewsNation where the entertainer wildly claimed that his “life was threatened by my Jewish managers, by my Jewish lawyer, by my Jewish accountant.”
Trump has also disparaged Jewish people recently in a statement on his TruthSocial platform, specifically those in Israel. His statement implored those citizens to “get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!” His words were sharply rebuked by Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid-pro-quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting,” he wrote on Twitter.
