Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jewish Trump Appointee Called Mark Zuckerberg A ‘Self-Hating Jew’

Image by twitter

A Jewish lawyer appointed to the Trump administration posted a slew of denigrating tweets -— calling former president Barack Obama a “Kenyan creampuff” and Mark Zuckerberg an “arrogant self-hating Jew.”

William C. Bradford was recently appointed by the Trump administration to run the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy. The tweets were sent from his now-deleted account before his appointment, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The tweets include a response to a story about Zuckerberg urging Iowans to vote against Trump in the primaries. “Who is this little arrogant self-hating Jew to tell anyone for whom to vote?” Bradford wrote.

Bradford also described Obama going on a mysterious “mission in Tehran.” Bradford wrote, “How else can a Kenyan creampuff get ahead?”

The reference to Obama as a Kenyan evoked the debunked (but still widespread) conspiracy theory — once championed by Trump — that Obama wasn’t born in America.

Bradford apologized for his comments in an email to the Post on Thursday.

“As a minority and member of the Jewish faith, I sincerely apologize for my disrespectful and offensive comments,” Bradford wrote. “These comments are inexcusable and I do not stand by them. Now, as a public servant, I hold myself to a higher standard, and I will work every day to better the lives of all Americans.”

Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.