Trump Shylock Slur: Second Use at Kansas Rally

The Trump Shylock slur returned to the campaign trail on Monday, when President Donald Trump again used the term — widely regarded as an antisemitic slur — at a rally in Park City, Kansas, while defending Sen. Roger Marshall against criticism of his medical billing practices.

Trump argued that Marshall had been treated unfairly over reporting that his former medical practice sued hundreds of patients over unpaid bills. The New York Times reported last month that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist before entering the Senate, and his former practice sued more than 700 patients, and that scores of arrest warrants were issued after patients missed court dates. Marshall called the story a "hit job," and his lawyer said he had no involvement in the warrants or the arrests.

Addressing Marshall onstage, Trump said the reporting had made it sound like the senator was "some kind of a shylock-type guy," adding that Marshall had been "mandated by law" to pursue the debts. "You got screwed with that stuff," Trump told him.

Speaking at the Heartland Credit Union Arena in Park City, Trump expanded on the legal argument at length, insisting the senator had no choice in the matter. "You're not allowed not to do it. You have to, by law, go after those people, and they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy," he said. "If he didn't make these requests, he would be breaking the law. He would have been breaking a very strong criminal law, and he would be subject to criminal arrest and liability." Trump also appeared to acknowledge, mid-anecdote, that the word was a risky choice, telling the crowd he probably should not have said it before adding: "But that's the way it is, Roger. I have to tell it like it is." Notably, Trump criticized the reporting without mentioning the Times by name.

The defense was the centerpiece of a rally staged to shore up Marshall, a one-term senator whose re-election race in a reliably Republican state has tightened unexpectedly in the final weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Instead, the president's word choice became the story — the second time in roughly two years that his use of the term has drawn attention.

Second Use of the Term

Monday's remark was the second time in roughly two years that Trump has used the word in public. In July 2025, at an Iowa rally, he called predatory lenders "shylocks and bad people," prompting condemnation from Jewish groups. The Anti-Defamation League called that use "very troubling and irresponsible," saying the term evokes a centuries-old antisemitic trope about Jews and greed that is "extremely offensive and dangerous."

The 2025 comment came as Trump was promoting his sweeping domestic policy bill and attacking lenders who charge families high interest rates. The ADL's response went further than a single-word rebuke. "It underscores how lies and conspiracies about Jews remain deeply entrenched in our country," the organization wrote at the time. "Words from our leaders matter and we expect more from the President of the United States." Other Jewish groups also denounced the remark. This time, Trump was not describing lenders in the abstract — he was applying the word, in a negated form, to the portrayal of a sitting senator who is not Jewish, in the course of arguing that the senator had been smeared.

A Long History as a Slur

The term traces back to Shakespeare's *The Merchant of Venice*, in which the Jewish character Shylock is a malicious moneylender. The ADL's teaching guide on the play says that "Shylock, and by extension, all Jews, are presented as money-hungry, conniving, and cruel."

After the 2025 episode, Trump claimed he had not realized the word carried antisemitic connotations. "I've never heard it that way," he told reporters at the time. "To me, Shylock is somebody that's a money lender at high rates."

Former President Joe Biden drew backlash for using the same term in 2014 and later apologized. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday's remarks.

The history matters because it shapes how Monday's comment is likely to be received. Biden's 2014 use, in remarks about predatory lending practices affecting service members, prompted a swift apology after the ADL's leadership raised objections — a precedent that established the term as one mainstream political figures are expected to avoid. Trump's 2025 defense was different: rather than apologizing, he said he understood the word only as a description of a high-interest moneylender and had never heard the antisemitic reading of it. That makes Monday's repetition harder to frame as inadvertent, since the controversy over the identical word was widely covered just last year, and the president was reminded of the objection in public at the time.

The Race That Brought Trump to Kansas

The rally existed because Marshall's seat, long considered safe, is suddenly in play. Marshall has represented Kansas in the Senate since 2021, after winning his 2020 race against Democrat Barbara Bollier by roughly 11 points. This year, however, he faces Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist megachurch pastor from suburban Kansas City and a former Republican who chose to run as a Democrat. Hamilton won the Democratic nomination in August and has picked up endorsements from two former Republican governors, adding to the sense that the race has escaped the usual partisan script.

The polling is startling for a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. An Emerson College poll of 750 likely Kansas voters released last month put Hamilton ahead of Marshall, 45% to 43%, within the survey's 3.6-point margin of error. A New York Times/Siena poll showed the two candidates tied at 45% each, and CBS News reported polling with Marshall one point behind. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as leaning Republican — competitive territory that Republican strategists did not expect to defend this cycle.

Hamilton has campaigned as a centrist, emphasizing issues such as unwinding tariffs and regulating data centers, and his support is expected to be strongest in the Kansas City area and its suburbs, including Johnson County. Marshall, meanwhile, has also fended off questions about owning a house in Florida, which Hamilton's supporters have used to paint him as an absent senator — an awkward line of attack in a race where the incumbent's central argument is that he, not the challenger, understands the real Kansas of wheat fields, ranches, and oil pump jacks.

National Republicans have responded with money. The Senate Leadership Fund, the party's main Senate super PAC, has reserved roughly $8.2 million in advertising to support Marshall over the final stretch, according to AdImpact data — funds that might otherwise have gone to traditional battlegrounds, redirected after the group shifted resources away from a difficult race in North Carolina. Marshall himself has acknowledged the race is tighter than expected while insisting he would win if the election were held today, saying he always runs "like we're 3 points down." He has attacked Hamilton as out of touch with the state's rural economy, asking what a suburban pastor knows of farmers, ranchers, and union workers. Economic anxiety in farm country — including drought damage to crops and high fuel and fertilizer costs — has fed the challenger's opening.

It was into this environment that Trump arrived in Park City, personally intervening in a state he carried comfortably, because control of the Senate could turn on seats exactly like this one.

Reaction and What Happens Next

As of Monday night, the White House had not responded to requests for comment on the remark, and initial news reports carried no fresh statement from the ADL, whose condemnation of last year's use was recirculated widely in coverage of the rally. Marshall's campaign, for its part, has spent weeks pushing back on the underlying Times reporting rather than on Trump's language: the senator has called the story a "hit job," and his lawyer has said Marshall had no involvement in the warrants or the arrests that followed some of the lawsuits.

The political question is whether the episode changes anything in the final two weeks before Election Day on Nov. 3. Trump's visit was designed to generate local coverage of an embattled incumbent and remind Republican voters why the seat matters; the slur instead risks dominating that coverage. For Marshall, who needs rural Republican turnout and cannot afford defections, the rally will still likely serve its basic purpose of energizing the base. But the remark guarantees that the national story out of Park City is not the Senate race — it is, once again, the president's vocabulary, and whether a word he was publicly corrected on in 2025 has now been used a second time with full knowledge of the objection.

The Kansas stop also underlines how much the map has shifted on Republicans this cycle. A president does not normally spend a Monday night in a state his party has held for generations unless the majority is genuinely at risk; CBS News framed the visit as part of a broader effort to hold Congress, with both parties pouring resources into Senate contests across the country. Whatever the rally's fallout, the fact that it happened at all — in Kansas, in late October — may be the clearest sign of how unsettled the midterm landscape has become.

Source: CNN