President Donald Trump on Monday used an antisemitic term that he has used publicly at least once before as he defended Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall against criticism over medical billing practices.
Trump invoked the term “Shylock” while defending Marshall’s suing more than 700 patients for outstanding medical bills during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist, as first reported by The New York Times.
“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,” Trump said at a rally in Kansas. “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.”
(That underlying claim is not true, according to Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law School: “He’s entitled to sue for unpaid bills but not required to do so.”)
Trump has previously faced criticism for using the term. In July 2025, he said it during a rally in Iowa. He later claimed he didn’t know the word was viewed by some as antisemitic.
“I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates,” Trump told reporters at the time. “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”
The Anti-Defamation League — which last year condemned Trump’s use of the word — wrote Tuesday on X that the term was “rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype.”
“Regardless of intent, its use can reinforce harmful tropes about Jews and normalize language that has long been used to target the Jewish community,” the group wrote.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, noted on X that Trump had previously been criticized publicly for using the term.
“Tonight Trump yet again used the antisemitic ‘Shylock’ — a year after he was called out for doing so and claimed he didn’t know it was problematic,” she said. “Again: not an accident. He has consistently normalized antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes.”
In 2014, former President Joe Biden apologized for using the word.
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This article originally appeared on CNN at https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/20/politics/trump-antisemitic-term-roger-marshalls-lawsuits