WASHINGTON — In a speech to be delivered just miles away from the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history, Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, will say Donald Trump would turn on the Jews “on a dime.”
Emhoff’s speech Monday evening, a week and a day before the presidential election, is the latest sign of how focused his wife Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and Trump’s are on wooing Jewish voters in a neck and neck race.
“Donald Trump demands loyalty — but isn’t loyal to anything but himself,” Emhoff will say, according to remarks shared in advance by the Harris campaign. “If it suited his personal interests, he would turn his back on Israel and the Jewish people on a dime – hell, he’d turn on anyone for the price of a dime.”
Emhoff, the campaign said, will refer to recent reports that Trump has said he admires Nazi generals because of the loyalty they showed Hitler, and his claim last month that Jews will be to blame if he does not win next week’s election.
“Whenever chaos and cruelty are given a green light, Jew-hatred is historically not far behind,” Emhoff’s remarks say. “That matters today because Donald Trump is nothing if not an agent of chaos and cruelty. It’s no coincidence that things have gotten worse for American Jews since Trump entered politics – just as they have for so many.”
The setting for Emhoff’s speech, the city’s University Club, is across the street from the Soldiers and Sailor’s Community Hall, six years exactly after much of the community gathered there in shock after the massacre the day before, Oct. 27, 2018, at the Tree of Life synagogue. A white supremacist murdered 11 worshipers, spurred by baseless conspiracy theories about migrants that echoed rhetoric embraced by Trump then and during his current election campaign.
Pennsylvania is also the swing state among seven at stake that has the largest Jewish population. Both campaigns have focused intensely on the 400,000 Jews in the state.
Trump has accused Harris and the incumbent president, Joe Biden, of endangering Israel with their policies, a claim he made again on Sunday night at a rally in Madison Square Garden.
Emhoff has been a longtime crusader against antisemitism and has turned his attention to criticizing Trump as the campaign season has advanced. “Donald Trump on Jews, it’s so vexing to me that any Jew supports him,” he said last week at a Jewish voters rally in Michigan. “He foments antisemitism everywhere he goes. He does not care about us.”
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