The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the use of the term “shylock” as antisemitic on Tuesday, without explaining that the slur had been used a day earlier by Donald Trump in a speech in Kansas.
Trump used the slur during a Monday night rally in support of Republican senator Roger Marshall, who is locked in a closer-than-expected re-election fight against Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. Marshall, a doctor, as been criticized for filing lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills, leading to 18 of them being arrested.
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”.
Trump also falsely claimed Marshall was “mandated by law” to “go after those people”.
The ADL’s brief social media post made no mention of Trump at all. The organization, founded to combat antisemitism, offered no explanation as to why it found it necessary to explain that anyone equating an avaricious person to Shylock, the villainous Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, is using an antisemitic trope.
“The term ‘Shylock’ is rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype,” the ADL posted on X but not its other social media accounts. “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 accuse the ADL of using accusations of antisemitism selectively, to attack people who are critical of Israel, suggested that the Jewish American civil rights group was going easy on Trump because of his support for Israel.
Trump’s use of the slur came just a day after he had endorsed Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the country’s elections.
Matt Duss, a former foreign police adviser to senator Bernie Sanders, the most prominent Jewish American politician, responded to the ADL’s failure to mention Trump by suggesting its president would have been more direct had someone else used the slur.
“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.
In 2014, after then vice-president Joe Biden described people who take financial advantage of American service members as “shylocks”, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director accepted his apology and called the remarks “a teachable moment”.
Trump previously used the slur during a 2025 rally in Iowa. The US president told supporters that eliminating the taxes on inherited family farms would save farmers from “going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases shylocks and bad people”.
The day after that Iowa rally, the ADL called the president’s use of the term “very troubling and irresponsible”, but Trump claimed ignorance when he was asked by a reporter if he had intended to use the word “shylocks” to refer to Jews.
“No, I’ve never heard it that way,” Trump replied then. “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.”
