Trump Promotes ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ With Antisemitic Slur

President Donald Trump has signed the “Big Beautiful Bill” into law, a sweeping domestic policy package that is collecting sharp criticism not just for its projected impact on the U.S. health care system—but also for the language Trump used while promoting it.

According to NBC News, Trump described exploitative bankers as “shylocks” during a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, while referencing a provision in the bill meant to ease estate taxes for family farms.

“No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, shylocks and bad people,” he said. “They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.”

The word “shylock” originates from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” where a Jewish moneylender is depicted as greedy and vengeful. NBC states that in the Anti-Defamation League, the character has long been used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Jewish people, particularly those involving money and power. The ADL called Trump’s use of the term “very troubling and irresponsible,” and stated on X that “words from our leaders matter, and we expect more from the President of the United States.”

When asked by reporters, Trump said,

“I’ve never heard it that way,” adding that he believed “shylock” simply meant “a money lender at high rates.”

Experts Warn New Budget Compromises Healthcare Beyond Federal Program Participants

While Trump’s phrasing dominated headlines, the broader concern lies in the contents of the bill itself. According to Time Magazine, one of the most consequential changes involves a reduction in the provider tax—a mechanism used by 47 states to help fund Medicaid. The bill cuts this tax from 6% to 3.5%, which experts say could dramatically weaken state budgets that rely on the tax to draw down federal Medicaid dollars.

In Time Magazine, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, wrote that this funding shift threatens to destabilize the nation’s health care infrastructure, especially for emergency rooms, hospitals, and nursing homes. He warns that the cuts could lead to the closure of more than 600 nursing homes across the country.

“When those doors shut, the whole system jams up—and the fallout lands in your local ER,” Jha explained, pointing to the domino effect of overextended hospitals being unable to discharge patients due to a lack of recovery centers.

This chain reaction, Jha added, can result in overcrowded emergency departments, longer wait times, and higher risks for conditions that depend on timely diagnosis, such as strokes and heart attacks.

According to Yahoo! News, further cuts included in the legislation could leave up to 17 million people without health insurance by 2034. This estimate, originally developed by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Democrats on the Senate Joint Economic Committee, is based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and includes impacts from both Medicaid cuts and the rollback of tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.

The CBO’s June analysis, cited by Yahoo! News, projected that the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing Medicaid and ACA coverage. Yahoo! News also states that KFF included additional policy impacts to reach the larger estimate of 17 million.

As of March 2025, more than 78 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid. For many, especially low-income households and rural communities, that coverage is their only path to care. Many online critics argue that the bill’s budgetary framework reshapes Medicaid not as a public safety net, but as a shrinking system increasingly dependent on the decisions of individual states.

The bill must still clear additional hurdles in the House before full implementation. For now, health policy experts, civil rights organizations, and elected officials continue to warn that the price of this “big, beautiful” win could be paid at the expense of emergency access, insurance coverage, and trust in the system meant to care for all Americans—regardless of income or circumstance.