Does Trump Have a Fan in … Louis Farrakhan?
Policy + Politics

Does Trump Have a Fan in … Louis Farrakhan?

© JAMES LAWLER DUGGAN / Reuters

They say “game recognize game,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that bigots are coming out of the woodwork to praise Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. Just days after notorious former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke called on his radio audience to support Donald Trump out of duty to the white “race,” the billionaire got a shout-out from somebody on the other end of the spectrum: Nation of Islam leader and notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan said during his annual Saviour’s Day sermon on Feb. 28:  “Have you noticed that there’s civil war brewing in the Republican Party? They don’t want Trump at all. … Let me just say why I think they’re all on Mr. Trump. They have decided he must never become president. Why? What has he done? Well, one of the things that he’s done is told them I’m a billionaire. And he’s only man probably in the last 100 years that stood in front of some of the members of the Jewish community and told them to their face, ‘I don’t want your money.’ Any time a man can say to those who con­trol the pol­i­tics of Amer­ica, ‘I don’t want your money,’ that means if I don’t take your money, you can’t con­trol me. And they can­not afford to give up con­trol of the pres­i­dents of the United States.”

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Farrakhan, however, stopped short of an explicit endorsement of the billionaire, saying, “Not that I’m for Mr. Trump, but I like what I’m look­ing at.”

While Trump has had some awkward moments with members of the Jewish faith, suggesting that he shares Duke’s and Farrakhan’s hatred for Jews seems a bit of a stretch. For example, his daughter Ivanka married an Orthodox Jew, converted to the faith herself and is raising Trump’s grandchildren as Jewish.

Trump also regularly praises his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for his intelligence and business acumen.

Still, the former reality television star ignited a firestorm on Sunday when he declined to disavow Duke and the KKK, whose anti-Semitism rival’s Farrakhan’s, in a CNN interview. 

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