Trump: Ignorant, Antisemitic, or Both?

Politics & Elections
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" President Donald Trump said early Friday that he wasn’t aware that some people view the word “Shylock” as antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral money lenders.

“I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates,” Trump told reporters after getting off Air Force One. “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.” Trump says he had ‘never heard’ Shylock as an anti-semitic term after using it at rally | CNN Politics
Personally, I think he knew, and that it won’t matter at all to his “true believers”.

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I mean, this is a guy who figures that the reason for the existence of Jews is to manage his money. Or would be, if he ever actually had any money.

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How erudite, coming from someone whose evangelical supporters would protest that Portia committed “the sin of empathy.”

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I’m voting for “both”.

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All three of them: ignorant, antisemite and liar.

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Trump’s bigotry is a direct result of his privilege.

I’m quite certain that things like,
‘When the slur for Poles are done with the drywall get the slur for Asians in to clean up so the slur for Italians can start painting.’
were commonly heard during his time as a developer and no sycophantic underling dare to point out Trump’s bigotry to him.

He doesn’t know any better because since his birth no one has taught him not to be a bigot, certainly not Fred Trump.

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I’m pretty surprised that he even knows the word “Shylock” at all. Seems too literary for him.

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You actually think he knows the origins of Shylock???

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Good grief, no way. This is a guy who paid other kids to attend classes for him.

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Yes.

How many people who know what a shylock means in banking terms but are ignorant of the Jewish connection? Extremely few, I think.

And Trump has previously trafficked in Jews = money stereotyping.

A big part of Trump’s shtick is to say that it’s OK to be an Archie Bunker. He needs to know the vocabulary well so he can calibrate how far he can go.

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But he may know about the Jewish connection without knowing the origin of that connection, in other words he knows that Shylock = Usurer (Jew) but doesn’t have the slightest idea about the Shakespeare character.

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These two are inextricably connected.

AIUI Shakespeare originated the name and its usage to refer to a Jewish person who was a banker or a money lender. Like Shakespeare’s character.

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The use of “Shylock” as a slur, if I am not mistaken comes from the Shakespeare character who was an usurer who wanted the proverbial “pound of flesh” in payment.
Your run of the mill ignoramus (like Trump) can perfectly use the word as an antisemitic slur without knowing its origin.

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I’m quite sure that in Trump’s ‘’‘brain’‘’ banker is the shortened form of Jewbanker.

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But you also have to accept as fact that no one ever told him it was a slur.

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Why?

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He either knows it is a slur, or he doesn’t.

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Yes, but that has no impact on whether or know he knows the origin of the word.
I think he know perfectly well that it’s a slur, he doesn’t know it comes from Shakespeare (because: ignorant) and really really doesn’t care about it being a slur, except perhaps as a show of power: “look, I can use slurs with impunity!”

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He doesn’t have to have an extensive Shakespearian knowledge base to know that it is a Jewish slur.