Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said Jewish-American voters would be partly to blame if he loses the election in November.
The former president lamented that he was trailing his Democratic Party rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, among American Jews, as he addressed the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Washington, DC.
“If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40 percent, I mean, 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy – Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years,” Trump said on Thursday.
Jews would be partly to blame for that outcome in the November 5 presidential election, Trump claimed, saying they tend to vote for Democrats.
He cited an unnamed poll that he said showed Harris polling at 60 percent among American Jews.
The former president has prided himself on his close ties with Israel and the Jewish community, and for being instrumental in moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
At a second event in the United States capital centered on denouncing anti-Semitism in the country, Trump said the Democratic Party had a “hold, or curse” on Jewish Americans and that he should be getting “100 percent” of Jewish votes because of his policies on Israel.
“My promise to Jewish Americans is this: With your vote, I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House,” Trump said during the donor event. “But in all fairness, I already am.”
Jewish voters in the US have leaned heavily towards Democrats in federal elections for decades and continue to do so. But just a small shift in that vote could determine the winner in November.
The Trump campaign has made winning over Jewish voters in key battleground states a priority.
In Pennsylvania, for example, there are more than 400,000 Jewish people, in a state Joe Biden won by 81,000 votes in 2020.
In a statement before the speech, Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, criticised Trump for at times associating with anti-Semites.
Trump has rejected accusations of anti-Semitism, saying he has a Jewish son-in-law.
During his comments, Trump also failed to address a CNN report published earlier in the day regarding the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who once called himself a “black NAZI” in a post on a pornographic forum.
Robinson has pledged to remain in the race despite the report and the Trump campaign appeared to be distancing itself from the candidate while still calling the battleground state a vital part to winning back the White House.
