Trump’s Jewish Consigliere Says Protesting Rabbis Should Be Ashamed
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
One of Donald Trump’s closest Jewish associates said rabbis who plan to protest the Republican front-runner’s speech at the upcoming AIPAC conference should be ashamed of themselves.
“Anyone who believes that @realDonaldTrump is a racist doesn’t know #Trump at all,” Michael Cohen, the Trump Organization’s executive vice president and Trump’s special counsel, said Thursday night on Twitter. “Shame on the protesting rabbis with #AIPAC.”
Several groups of rabbis — chief among them, the Reform movement’s rabbinical association — have said they plan to protest Trump’s speech Monday evening at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference.
The rabbis have said they do not fault AIPAC for inviting Trump. The pro-Israel lobby has invited all the major candidates to speak and all but Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have accepted.
The protesters object to Trump’s broadsides against minorities, including Mexicans and Muslims, and say he must assume responsibility for violence at several of his rallies.
Cohen made headlines last year when he told The Daily Beast news site that “you cannot rape your wife, there’s very clear case law.”
Cohen later apologized, and the Trump campaign distanced itself from him, although he has retained his position in Trump’s corporation.
The Daily Beast was reviving allegations from a 1993 book that Trump had raped his first wife, Ivana. Both Donald and Ivana Trump have said that the allegation is scurrilous.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
