The president had already been told what the word means. At a Kansas rally, he reached for it while defending a senator's medical-debt lawsuits.
OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PORTRAIT, 2017 (PUBLIC DOMAIN)
Donald Trump was defending Republican Sen. Roger Marshall at an October 19 rally in Park City, Kansas, when he reached for a familiar term. Critics, he complained, had made Marshall sound like a predatory debt collector. The transcript records his description:
“And they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy.”
This was the character reference. Imagine what the attack ad would have sounded like.
Trump was answering criticism of Marshall's medical-billing practices. CNN reported that Marshall had sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills during his career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, citing the New York Times investigation. Trump claimed the law required Marshall to pursue the debts. Georgetown health-law expert Lawrence Gostin told CNN: “He’s entitled to sue for unpaid bills but not required to do so.”
So the defense came with a legal obligation the expert says did not exist, delivered through a word carrying an antisemitic stereotype about money. Quite a favor to do a man you're campaigning for.
Shylock is the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The character's name has long been used as an insult invoking Jewish greed. Trump was objecting to that portrayal of Marshall, not identifying the senator as Jewish. The problem is using the stereotype as the recognizable shorthand for the bad kind of lender.
On October 20, the Anti-Defamation League called the term “rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype.” Its statement, reproduced by Mediaite, warned that using it can normalize harmful tropes. It did not name Trump. The word apparently wandered into the news on its own.
Trump's earlier explanation belongs in the record, too. After he used the term in Iowa in July 2025, he said he had “never heard it that way” and understood it to mean a moneylender charging high rates, CNN reports. That was last year's response. The public criticism came then. This year's Kansas speech came afterward.
This archive has also documented Elon Musk endorsing an explicitly antisemitic post. The incidents differ. What links them is the permission powerful people give familiar prejudices when they put them back into circulation.
Trump could have said Marshall was being unfairly portrayed as a loan shark. Ordinary English had the job covered. He reached for the Jewish stereotype again.
Donald Trump was defending Republican Sen. Roger Marshall at an October 19 rally in Park City, Kansas, when he reached for a familiar term. Critics, he complained, had made Marshall sound like a predatory debt collector. The transcript records his description:
“And they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy.”
This was the character reference. Imagine what the attack ad would have sounded like.
Trump was answering criticism of Marshall's medical-billing practices. CNN reported that Marshall had sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills during his career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, citing the New York Times investigation. Trump claimed the law required Marshall to pursue the debts. Georgetown health-law expert Lawrence Gostin told …
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