'Where does Elise Stefanik get off': Rep who led antisemitism hearings blasted for Trump support
After the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill following her appearance at a House committee hearing on anti-Semitism, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) tweeted "one down. Two to go." But a Jewish member of Congress is crying foul on his colleague's zeal toward addressing anti-Semitism.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said over the weekend that Stefanik's steadfast support of former President Donald Trump negates her claims to care about anti-Jewish sentiment on college campuses.
"Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?" Raskin said in an interview with MSNBC's Ali Velshi. "She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner."
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"The Republican party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that and yet somehow [Stefanik] gets on [her] high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT," Raskin added.
Raskin's comments about Trump stem from a 2022 dinner the former president had at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West — the latter of whom appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' show and said "I like Hitler."
"Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social gathering, confirming the reports. "Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport."
The former president has been a frequent target of critics for his embracing of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Following the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville that ended with a white supremacist driving his car into a crowd of protesters — killing Heather Heyer and injuring nearly two dozen others — then-President Trump said in a press conference that there were "very fine people on both sides." Andrew Anglin, the founder of neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, celebrated Trump's statement, noting he "outright refused to disavow" white supremacists and anti-Semites.
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