White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday refused to say whether President Trump believes Democrats hate Jewish people, as he publicly suggested last week.
Asked whether Trump believes Democrats harbor hatred toward Jews, Sanders responded, “That’s a question, frankly, I think you should ask Democrats.”
She also accused Democrats of not doing enough to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) remarks about pro-Israel groups that were widely criticized as being anti-Semitic.
{mosads}“They’re unwilling to call this what it is and call it out by name and take actual action against members who have done things like this like the Republicans have done,” Sanders said, citing House GOP leaders’ decision to strip Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) of his committee assignments for remarks about white supremacists.
Democrats passed a resolution last week condemning anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, a measure Sanders and other Republicans said was “watered down” because it did not target Omar by name.
The resolution did call out the charge of dual loyalty, which Omar was accused of invoking when she said she wanted to “talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Trump said last week that the controversy shows Democrats have become the “anti-Jewish party.” The president told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors Friday that “the Democrats hate Jewish people,” according to Axios.
Democrats and civil rights groups have accused Trump of hypocrisy, citing his August 2017 comments that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a Charlottesville, Va., rally where a white supremacist killed a counterprotester.
Asked about those comments, Sanders responded that Trump has “been incredibly clear and consistently and repeatedly condemned hatred, bigotry, racism in all of its forms … and to say otherwise is simply untrue.”
Sanders spoke at her first press briefing since Jan. 28, a span of 42 days.