President Donald Trump used his rally in Park City, Kansas, on Monday night to defend Sen. Roger Marshall head-on, telling the senator that the reporting about his years as a practicing physician gave him "a bum rap" and that he "got screwed with that stuff."
"He was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients," Trump told the crowd at the Heartland Credit Union Arena. "You have to by law go after those people, and they made it like he was some kind of a shylock-type guy. They gave him a bum rap… You got screwed with that stuff." Trump addressed the remarks to Marshall, who was on stage with him, and did not mention the New York Times by name.
"They gave him a bum rap… You got screwed with that stuff."
The reporting Trump was answering appeared in the New York Times last month. The Times reported that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist before he entered politics, sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills, and that scores of those lawsuits resulted in arrest warrants for patients who missed court dates.
Marshall and his team have rejected the story's framing from the start. His lawyer said Marshall had no involvement in the warrants or the arrests, and his spokesperson has pointed out that judges issue the warrants when defendants miss court dates — not the physicians who file the claims. Marshall himself called the story a "hit job."
Trump's legal defense of Marshall is itself disputed. The Hill and others have reported that there isn't a law that required Marshall to sue patients. Trump's position on stage was the opposite: that failing to pursue the money would itself have broken the law. "If he didn't make these requests, he would be breaking the law," Trump said. "He would have been breaking a very strong criminal law, and he would be subject to criminal arrest and liability."
The word that drew the sharpest reaction was "shylock." Trump said the reporting made Marshall, who is not Jewish, out to be "some kind of a shylock-type guy" — a term critics call an antisemitic slur, drawn from the Jewish moneylender in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." The Anti-Defamation League, in a guide for educators teaching the play, says "Shylock, and by extension, all Jews, are presented as money-hungry, conniving, and cruel." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's remarks.
Trump has used the term before. Last year, describing exploitative bankers as he promoted his sweeping domestic policy bill, he denied knowing the antisemitic connotations of the word, saying he had "never heard it that way" and adding: "To me, shylock is somebody that's a moneylender at high rates." Some Jewish groups denounced that use of the term. Former President Joe Biden faced backlash for using the word in 2014 and later apologized.
Marshall, who has represented Kansas in the Senate since 2021, faces Democrat Adam Hamilton in a closer-than-expected race. On Monday night, with the president standing beside him on stage, the senator got the defense he has been making for a month — delivered by the president of the United States, in person, to a home-state crowd.