Trump shrugs off prospect of Shapiro helping Harris in November

Former President Donald Trump dismissed the possibility that Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) could help Vice President Kamala Harris win so-called blue wall states in November should she tap him as her running mate.

“If she picks Shapiro, she’s going to lose the Palestinian vote, and that’s fine,” Trump told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday. “Everybody has their liabilities. I think if you pick Shapiro, who happens to be Jewish, she loses her little Palestinian base because she has, because they like me because they think I’m going to bring peace to the Middle East, even though I’m very strong for Israel.”

The Harris campaign has previewed that the vice president will appear with her running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, though it has downplayed that the location means it will be Shapiro. She has been interviewing her short list since Friday.

Shapiro is popular in Pennsylvania, with the Keystone State a must-win for Harris because of its 19 Electoral College votes. But aside from concerns regarding his management of a sexual harassment complaint against an aide, he has been criticized by far-Left Democrats who disapprove of President Joe Biden‘s approach to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which Harris has indicated she will likely continue.

That criticism has been the impetus behind a “No Genocide Josh” push amid veepstakes and has been exacerbated, for example, by an article Shapiro wrote for the University of Rochester’s student newspaper, the college he graduated from in 1995.

“Palestinians will not peacefully coexist,” Shapiro wrote, because “they do not have the capabilities to establish their own homelands and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States,” in addition to being “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”

“Since he wrote this piece as a 20-year-old student, Gov. Shapiro has built close, meaningful, informative relationships with many Muslim-American, Arab-American, Palestinian Christian, and Jewish community leaders all across Pennsylvania,” Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder told the Washington Examiner. “The governor greatly values their perspectives and the experiences he has learned from over the years — and as a result, as with many issues, his views on the Middle East have evolved into the position he holds today.”

The Israel-Hamas war is poised to have political repercussions in another battleground state, Michigan, which comprises of the blue wall with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that Trump cracked in 2016. Although Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary in February with 81% of the vote, 101,430 Democrats, or 13% of the primary electorate, cast an “uncommitted” ballot to protest the war in a state that is home to the country’s largest Arab American population. Biden won Michigan by 154,188 votes in 2020.

Trump made the comments during an interview with Maria Bartiromo for Sunday Morning Futures, which was taped last Thursday before the former president met with members of the FBI who are investigating the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month. Trump has experienced tensions with the FBI in the past when the federal law enforcement agency had investigated him related to other matters.

“The FBI has such potential,” he said. “They’re looking into what happened with the, you know, how a thing like that could have happened. It’s a very friendly meeting. I have no doubt about that. They want to find out.”