Former President Donald Trump privately promised donors he would adopt a hard-line stance against pro-Palestinian student demonstrators after encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end his war against Hamas.
“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said during a May 14 roundtable event in New York, according to the Washington Post.
Trump described the demonstrators as being part of a “radical revolution” and praised the New York Police Department for helping Columbia University dismantle its student protest encampment, which started last month.
“Well, if you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he said.
Trump has been criticized for his response to Netanyahu’s handling of the war, particularly from then-Republican primary opponents who scrutinized his calling Lebanese militant group Hezbollah “very smart” and recalling “a bad experience with Israel as president,” alleging Netanyahu “let us down” when he decided against participating in the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. More recently, Trump has urged Netanyahu to “get it over with … get back to peace and stop killing people” as the Israel Defense Forces try to root out Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist organization killed roughly 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage on Oct. 7.
But during the roundtable, Trump told the group, which he said included “98% of my Jewish friends,” that he support Israel’s “war on terror” and touted his Middle East foreign policy, though he told Time last month he is “not sure a two-state solution anymore is gonna work.”
“So I did Golan Heights. You know that’s worth $2 trillion, they said, that piece, if you put it in real estate terms. But it’s worth more than that. It is,” Trump said during the event. “How can a Jewish person vote for a Democrat and [President Joe] Biden in particular — but forget Biden. They always let you down.”
The Trump campaign defended the former president’s record, contending when he “is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Examiner on Monday.
At the same time, the Biden campaign has been critical of Trump’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war and his appeals to the Jewish community before November’s election.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“As president, Donald Trump said Neo-Nazi marchers were ‘very fine people,’” spokesman Charles Lutvak told reporters earlier this month. “Now, like a cuckoo clock of hate, he is popping up every month with the same patronizing antisemitic shtick and reminding Jewish voters that he has no respect for us.”