On Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted that people protesting against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court by confronting members of Congress are “paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” adding that they were “paid for by Soros and others.”
Trump repeats a George Soros conspiracy theory right before Kavanaugh vote
Trump tweeted that protestors were “paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad.”
This is the first time the president has referenced Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, whose links to progressive causes have made him a far-right boogeyman both in the United States and around the world.
Since Kavanaugh’s nomination, a number of prominent figures across the conservative spectrum have referenced Soros’s possible involvement in protest movements. For example, on September 24, a columnist for National Review accused Deborah Ramirez, one of the women who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct or harassment, of receiving funding from Soros via a fellowship in 2003 (which actually went to a different Deborah Ramirez.)
That same columnist, John Fund, wrote on September 30 that the two women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in an elevator in the US Capitol and told him about their own experiences of sexual assault were evidence that “ACORN’s tactics … live on in the senator’s elevator confrontation with activists from a Soros-backed group.” ACORN is a community organization accused by many on the right of massive voter fraud. Fund’s evidence was that the women worked with the Center for Popular Democracy, which had received some funding from the Open Society Foundation, a Soros-led effort.
I wrote earlier this year about the space Soros occupies in the hearts and minds of conservatives, in an attempt to explain why Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted a bizarre claim from comedian Roseanne Barr that Soros was a “nazi who turned in his fellow Jews”:
Though a GOP donor in the 1980s and 1990s, Soros has been the right’s most feared opponent since he spent more than $25 million to defeat George W. Bush in 2004, leading one conservative website to call him “a prolocutor in the congregation of Moloch.” Disgraced former House Speaker Dennis Hastert even alleged that Soros’s fortune came from financing drug cartels overseas. Since then, Soros has spent billions on (largely progressive) causes from Ebola prevention to opposing torture and protecting LGBTQ rights abroad, and has donated to Democratic Party causes like Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
No wonder, then, that Soros has been linked by the right to virtually every liberal cause imaginable in an attempt to argue that any organic protest or outcry on the left is really the work of one sinister, shadowy (foreign) billionaire. Even Republicans have been victims of allegations of “scandalous” ties to Soros. A GOP candidate in North Carolina was the target of an attack ad alleging that he’d received “$80,000 in George Soros-backed campaign contributions” (he didn’t).
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