Trump used the same term at an Iowa rally in 2025
The Anti-Defamation League denounced the use of “shylock” as an antisemitic trope on Tuesday, but its brief social media post did not mention Donald Trump or explain that he had used the term at a Kansas rally the previous night. The organization was founded to combat antisemitism, yet the post offered no reason for addressing the word in general terms.
Trump used the term during a Monday-night rally in Park City, Kansas, supporting Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Marshall was locked in a closer-than-expected re-election fight against Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. The senator and doctor had been criticized for filing lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills, leading to 18 arrests.
Trump said Marshall’s critics, by highlighting the patient lawsuits in campaign ads, “made it like, oh, he was some kind of a shylock-type guy.” He also falsely claimed that Marshall was “mandated by law” to “go after those people.”
The ADL explained that equating an avaricious person with Shylock, the villainous Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, invokes an antisemitic trope. The organization posted its message on X but not on its other social media accounts.
“The term ‘Shylock’ is rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype,” the ADL posted. “Regardless of intent, its use can reinforce harmful tropes about Jews and normalize language that has long been used to target the Jewish community.”
Critics who accused the ADL of using allegations of antisemitism selectively against people critical of Israel suggested that the organization was going easy on Trump because of his support for Israel. Trump’s Kansas remarks came one day after he endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s elections.
Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, responded to the ADL’s failure to identify Trump. “If a Democrat said it, [ADL CEO] Jonathan Greenblatt would be knocking people over to get in front of a camera to condemn them by name, but it was Trump, so it’s just a general public service announcement,” Duss wrote.
The ADL had previously criticized Trump for using the same term at an Iowa rally in 2025. Trump said eliminating taxes on inherited family farms would prevent farmers from “going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases shylocks and bad people.” The next day, the ADL called the usage “very troubling and irresponsible.”
Trump then claimed he had not intended the term as a reference to Jews. “No, I’ve never heard it that way,” Trump said. “To me, a shylock is somebody that’s a, uh, a moneylender at high rates. I’ve never heard it that way. You view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”
In 2014, then Vice President Joe Biden described people who took financial advantage of American service members as “shylocks.” The ADL’s national director accepted Biden’s apology and called the remarks “a teachable moment.”