Soros’s son: Trump fostered vitriol that led to attack
WASHINGTON (JTA) – The son of Jewish billionaire George Soros said US President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign contributed to the antisemitic and antidemocratic atmosphere that he claims are linked to bomb scares directed at his father, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
“While the responsibility lies with the individual or individuals who sent these lethal devices to my family home and Mr. Obama’s and Ms. Clinton’s offices, I cannot see it divorced from the new normal of political demonization that plagues us today,” Alexander Soros wrote in The New York Times.
The younger Soros also accused Trump of indulging in antisemitic trope that often places his father, a Jewish billionaire who supports liberal causes, at the center of world-wide conspiracies.
Explosive devices were sent this week to Soros, former president Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Obama-era attorney-general Eric Holder, as well as to the New York offices of CNN. Each listed the falsified return address of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Florida office. She was the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and is Jewish. The Holder package was misaddressed and returned to Wasserman Schultz’s office, which police evacuated. None of the devices have exploded or caused injury.
Trump and administration officials have condemned the attempted attacks.
The younger Soros said his father’s liberal and political philanthropy was inspired by his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Up until Trump’s 2016 campaign, his father suffered antisemitic attacks, but only from fringe groups, he said.
“Mr. Trump’s final TV ad [of his 2016 campaign] famously featured my father; Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs – all of them Jewish – amid dog-whistle language about ‘special interests’ and ‘global special interests,’” he wrote. “A genie was let out of the bottle, which may take generations to put back in, and it wasn’t confined to the United States.”
At the time of the ad, a number of Jewish groups condemned what they said were antisemitic insinuations.
George Soros has featured large in Republican and rightwing rhetoric surrounding the 2018 midterm elections. Some conspiracy theories link the philanthropist to a caravan of migrants from Central America and to protests against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. Trump appears to have amplified some of these theories, for which he and others have provided no evidence.