Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories About Soros and “Ethnic Replacement”
Nonetheless, only 22 percent of Jewish-Americans trust Trump to fight anti-Semitism. Indeed, during his administration, almost 60 percent of them believed that the Republican leader had been responsible for the shootings in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, perpetrated by white supremacists who believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
The attack in Pittsburgh in 2018, in fact, came in the same weeks in which the Republicans, including Gaetz, they blamed the Democrats and George Soros of having financed a caravan of migrants headed from Mexico to the American border. Trump himself he hadn’t ruled it out that Soros’ money was behind the story. The philanthropist of Hungarian origin has now replaced, in the anti-Semitic imagination, i banchieri Rothschild in the role of the international Jewish financier – both capitalist and Marxist depending on convenience – who destabilizes the world thanks to his wealth and directs the course of events.
Trump feels persecuted, he also accused him that he manipulated Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into indicting him in the case of payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels that were illicitly diverted from campaign funds. «He hates humanity. It wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” he said of Soros Elon Musk, who he compared to Magneto, the Marvel villain who survived the Holocaust.
To escape the disapproval of Jewish associations, some figures on the American right they constituted a group, “Jews against Soros”, with the intention of demonstrating that one can attack the financier without being anti-Semitic. Trump doesn’t he even named one of the promoters, Will Scharf, as the next White House staff secretary.
Overall, the president-elect seems to surround himself with a few too many people with previous anti-Semitic stumbles. Musk, for example, went well beyond a tasteless joke about Soros: after purchasing Twitter, he resettled several anti-Semitic accounts on the platform e he publicly endorsed a post against Jews. The controversy that arose was such that induce him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp, in January 2024, to rehabilitate his reputation.
Gaetz, whom we mentioned above, was also Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the equivalent of justice secretary, before he retired to some scandals that concerned him, from drug abuse to sexual harassment of a minor.
Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, designated as health secretary. Robert’s son and JFK’s grandson, long engaged in the misinformation on vaccines, he surmised that Covid-19 was engineered in the laboratory to save Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews from contagion, thus giving new life to medieval anti-Semitic slanders about the origin of the plague.
Despite having apologized, it is not the first time that he offends the tragic history of the Jews to support his anti-vaccination theses: in January 2022, he inappropriately compared the condition of the unvaccinated resembles that of Anne Frank under the German occupation, thus relativizing the dimension of Nazi persecution; and in 2015 he brought up the Holocaust to describe the effects of vaccinations on children, primarily the false correlation with autism.
Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic rhetoric
Finally, we must remember what, perhaps, was the most embarrassing meeting for Trump: dinner at the Mar-a-Lago residence, in December 2022, with the rapper Kanye West, now better known as Ye, and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, whom the artist had then hired as an advisor for his hypothetical presidential campaign. Trump’s staff and Trump himself were quick to distance themselves from Fuentes, swearing not to know him, even though in that period, it was Ye himself who was causing indignation for his elogi a Hitler.
While there is no evidence that Trump shares the anti-Semitic utterances of his circle, he has repeatedly worn down his reputation as a friend of the Jews – and even a relative, given that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is from a Jewish family and his daughter Ivanka converted to the religion of her husband – with several statements that reinforce age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes.
In particular, Trump has often invoked the trope of “dual allegiance,” whereby Jewish-Americans are bound by an oath of allegiance to Israel, as well as to their homeland. «We appreciate you very much, we also love your country», he said Trump in September 2020, during a phone call to Jewish-American religious leaders, implying that they are not American citizens, but rather Israeli citizens with the right to vote in the United States. Let it not be an occasional one failurethe president-elect has demonstrated this in other contexts, for example referring to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” during an event with Jewish Republican voters, or speaking of Israeli Ambassador David Friedman as “your ambassador”, in various meetings with Jewish-Americans.
Trump also insisted on some characteristics stereotypically attributed to Jews, such as the fact that they are good at business or that they use their money to gain influence on politics: five times – he counted them il Washington Post – the tycoon refused a financial offer from Jewish associations which, however, never arrived.
Precisely because he considers himself so popular among Jews that he could potentially be elected prime minister in Israel, Trump cannot understand his lack of electoral following among Jewish-Americans.
His frustration was thus vented in further clichés about the dual loyalty mechanism – “every Jew who votes for a Democrat demonstrates a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” he declared in 2019 – or even in threats, as during the last presidential race, when he threatened Jewish-Americans who would hold them responsible for his eventual defeat: «60% of Jews will vote for Kamala or a Democrat. And I honestly think you should get your head examined. […] I was not treated fairly by Jewish voters. Do they know what the hell will happen if I don’t win this election? The Jews will have a lot to do with this if that happens, because it would mean that 60 percent would have voted for the enemy.”
According to historian Timothy SnyderTrump has a vision of Jews that is linked, in a worrying way, to Hitler’s anti-Semitism, due to at least five beliefs it contains: 1) that Jews can be evaluated as an ethnic group in their own right; 2) that Jews are required to pass a loyalty test; 3) that Jews have more power than others; 4) that a Jewish vote for a political opponent makes him illegitimate; and 5) that the Jews betray behind their backs.
If, therefore, on the one hand the new Trump administration will instrumentally raise the accusation of anti-Semitism to accredit itself as protector of Jewish-Americans and the State of Israel, on the other, even before leaving, it is already perpetuating a rhetoric recognizable as anti-Semitic and normalizing speeches that, until a few years ago, were marginalized to the most extreme right. Not the best strategy to protect the historical memory of the Jewish people and the safety of Jews around the world.
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