Former U.S. president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Monday that the “Democrat Party hates Israel.”
The remark came in response to a question from Sebastian Gorka on his “America First” show on the Salem Radio Network about why those associated with the Biden administration, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) , dislike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I actually think they hate Israel. I don’t think they hate him [Netanyahu]. I think they hate Israel. The Democrat Party hates Israel,” said Trump.
The 45th president added that vote-seeking was part of the reason that in his view the Democrats have turned their back on America’s Middle East ally.
“When you see those Palestinian marches, even…I’m amazed at how many people are at those marches, and guys like Schumer see that and to him its votes. I think its votes more than anything else because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now,” said Trump.
He went on to say that Jews who vote for the party should be ashamed of themselves.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel. And they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed,” he said, citing Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
He reminded listeners that under his term in office he ended the Iranian nuclear agreement, and said that if he had been reelected he would have forged another deal with Iran “that would have been good for everybody, with no nuclear weapons.”
“With me Iran was broke. They were absolutely stone-cold broke. There was no terrorism because they didn’t have money to fund Hamas and Hezbollah and the other 28 groups. They had no money. They were stone-cold broke,” said Trump.
“These people are the worst, there’s something wrong with them,” Trump said of the Democrat Party. “They are the worst negotiators. All they are good at is evil. They are evil people. Sick. Evil.”
Trump said that the United States is “like a puppet for China now” under President Joe Biden, who he called a “Manchurian candidate” and the “worst president in the history of our country by 10 times. There’s never been anything like it. Jimmy Carter is the only one happy because he’s a brilliant president compared to Biden.”
Gorka asked Trump if China has compromised Biden and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
“I think they have it on Biden, yeah. They probably have it on Schiff too. But I think they have something on Biden. There’s no reason why Biden could be so weak with China. It’s pathetic,” said the former president.
On Sunday, Trump said there was “100% no question” Schumer and the Biden administration are telling Israel how to run its government.
“The Democrats are very bad for Israel. Israel sticks with them. I guess Israel’s loyal maybe to a fault because they stick with these guys,” he told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz.
In a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday that Schumer described as a “major address” on a possible two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, the Democrat labeled some of Netanyahu’s senior Cabinet members as “bigots” and “extremists” and called for an early election.
Schumer claimed that he was speaking on behalf of “mainstream Jewish Americans” and represented their views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He suggested that Washington consider conditioning or cutting off military aid to Jerusalem unless a new government is formed.
According to Trump, if the Democrats had been good to the Jewish state, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist massacre of 1,200 people, primarily Jewish civilians, in the northwestern Negev would never have happened.
“If he [Biden] were supportive of Israel, the Iran nuclear deal would have never been signed and Israel would have never been attacked,” Trump told Fox News, adding: “I’ll bet you I would have had Iran in the Abraham Accords.”
Forty-four percent of Israelis want Trump to win November’s election, compared to 30% who would prefer Biden to secure a second term, according to a Channel 12 poll published last week.
Twenty-six percent of respondents said they did not know whom they wanted elected.
Breaking the figures down, 72% of respondents who voted for parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition said they preferred Trump, while 8% chose Biden. By contrast, 55% of respondents who cast a ballot for parties in the Israeli opposition preferred Biden, compared to 23% for Trump.
The poll of 504 Israelis had a maximum sampling error of 4.4 percentage points.
Trump and Biden clinched the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, respectively, in primaries last week, setting up a rematch of the 2020 election.