Donald Trump reportedly cracked jokes to his Jewish employees about Nazi “ovens,” according to a former executive at his organization.
Former Trump Organization Executive Vice President Barbara Res claimed Sunday that she and other employees had been mistreated by Trump, years before he’d become a belligerent politician. Res, an attorney and now author, worked at the Trump Organization for 18 years before leaving in 1998.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Res said that Trump’s recent rants reminded her of a time when he made a blatantly antisemitic comment to a group of Jewish employees.
Res said that Trump had recently hired a new German executive, and “was bragging to us executives about how great the guy was and he was a real German, and he was so neat and clean. And then he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘You better watch out for this guy, he sort of remembers the ovens,’ and then smiled.
“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that, but he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people. And that’s the way he was.”
Velshi also asked Res what she made of Trump’s recent “embrace of religion” as he has continued to co-opt religious rhetoric on the campaign trail.
“His embrace of religion is absolute nonsense,” she said, adding that the Trump she knew “mocked religious people.”
It seems that in many ways, Trump is still the same. Trump has repeatedly said that any Jewish person who votes for President Joe Biden in November should be “ashamed,” have their “head examined,” and “does not love Israel.” Instead, Trump thinks people should vote for a guy who makes jokes about Nazi ovens and whose team is chock full of Christian nationalists and white supremacists.
Trump’s criticism of Biden on Israel is a sharp departure from reality, as the Biden administration has continued to fund weapons to Israel as it wages its brutal military campaign in Gaza, in the face of a crashing approval rate over Biden’s steadfast support of the mass killing and displacement of Palestinians.
