Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday ripped pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses as either “dumbasses” or “terrorist sympathizers” and called on the Department of Justice to investigate who is funding the protest movement.
“There’s two classes of people here. Antisemites: If you say, ‘We are Hamas,’ and you mean it, then you are a religious Nazi. If you say, ‘We are Hamas,’ and you don’t know what Hamas is all about, you are a dumbass,” Graham said during a Fox News interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“So there’s dumbasses and there’s terrorist sympathizers, and how do you fix this?” he said. “Win in November.”
Graham said the best way to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests on campus is to investigate who is funding them and vowed that former President Trump would make it a top priority if reelected.
“Here’s what I can promise you, if Donald Trump were president of the United States, his attorney general would be all over this. These college presidents would be under the gun to stop this crap,” he said.
The House last week passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would direct the Department of Education to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism to review complaints of discrimination.
That bill is now stalled in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters last week there were objections from “both sides” of the aisle to moving it forward.
But some Republicans such as Graham want to go further to scrutinize groups that are supporting the protests.
Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said last week Democratic mega-donor George Soros has “funded a lot of this, stirring this all up.”
“We know he loves to put his money into upsetting people and causing situations like this,” she said on her podcast.
She did not provide any evidence that Soros is in fact funding the protests.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested recently that Soros or another group is behind the protests because many of the tents the demonstrators have set up on various campuses appear to be the same model.
“I think [FBI officials] need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or overseas entities,” Johnson speculated during an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill” program.
That claim drew sharp criticism from House Democrats who argued that to portray Soros, who is Jewish, as some kind of villainous mastermind is itself an antisemitic trope.
“Not even 24 hours after passing a do-nothing bill under the guise of ‘fighting antisemitism,’ @SpeakerJohnson drags out one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the world,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) posted on the social platform X.
A spokesperson for Soros’s Open Society Foundations on Wednesday pointed to a statement released after Johnson’s remarks that said the group “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel and the OPT.”
“This funding is a matter of public record, disclosed on our website, fully compliant with US laws, and is part of our commitment to continuing open debate that is ultimately the only hope for peace in the region,” the spokesperson added.
Lauren Irwin contributed to this report, which was updated at 11:52 a.m. EDT