What did Donald Trump do today?
He decided that racism and antisemitism was the key to winning Kansas.
Trump attended a rally tonight that was, at least in theory, in support of Kansas's incumbent Republican Senator, Roger Marshall. He used the occasion to drop an antisemitic slur before launching into a racist tirade about the intelligence of people of African descent.
Marshall, who was a physician before entering politics, has been hurt by revelations that he sued hundreds of impoverished patients for as little as $50, and that some of them went to jail as a result of his actions. Trump defended Marshall by saying the law required him to sue—which is a lie—and then complained that Marshall was unfairly being characterized as "some kind of a Shylock type guy."
The reference to the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice is an old-fashioned slur against Jews for their supposed greediness. It's rarely used in modern American English, even by people who are antisemites, but Trump seems determined to bring it back into everyday use: he also dropped it last year to describe "bankers" who supposedly opposed his budget bill. (He claimed at the time he didn't know about its antisemitic meaning.)
Trump also ranted about a favorite target for his nineteenth-century-style racism: Americans of Somali descent, who he described as having subnormal intelligence and criminal tendencies.
Trump: "You go up to Minnesota -- number one place in the entire country for the sale of Mercedes-Benz. And Somalians are buying them. They come here with low IQs and no money and they get rich. Do we feel stupid? Our fraud division is getting them all."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 19, 2026 at 7:27 PM
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Under normal circumstances, Kansas's Senate seat would never be at risk for Republicans. The seat that Marshall is trying to retain hasn't been held by a Democrat since 1919. Marshall beat his Democratic opponent by 12 points in 2020, and Trump carried the state by 16 points in 2024.
But many Republicans, and an overwhelming number of independent voters, have quickly soured on Trump's second term. His national approval rating has fallen to 31% in the most recent national poll, with more than twice as many voters disapproving of his performance in office.
Trump has made himself the center of the campaign—often directly against the wishes of Republican candidates, who would appeal more to voters if they could get some distance from his spectacularly unpopular agenda. But Trump is also quick to lash out at Republicans who show any sign of breaking away from his agenda, and has even insulted Republican candidates from the same stage he's supposedly campaigning for them.
Trump, whose first appearance in public life was as the losing defendant in a lawsuit where he was caught discriminating against Black renters, is the son of Fred Trump Sr., who was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927—a time when the "Shylock" slur was in more common usage. The KKK is a white supremacist movement that opposes immigrants, Jews, and non-whites.
Why does this matter?
- The United States needs a president whose brain isn't rotted by century-old bigotry.