George Soros Is a Villain to Many, Not Just the Fringe
the influence Mr. Soros has built on the left.
Mr. Trump references Mr. Soros in Twitter posts and speeches as a donor to anti-Trump protesters, and the president’s family and closest advisers sometimes go much further. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a claim this year by the comedian Roseanne Barr that Mr. Soros is a Nazi. And the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, retweeted a comment saying that Mr. Soros is the Antichrist whose assets should be frozen.
In at least one case, the attacks made their way into United States government- funded media. The Spanish-language Radio Television Marti network, which broadcasts pro- United States content in Cuba, aired a report in May that is now the subject of a government investigation. The report called Mr. Soros a “multimillionaire Jew” of “flexible morals,” who was “the architect of the financial collapse of 2008.”
In the final days of the midterm election race, in which he spent heavily to elect Democrats, Mr. Soros was being cast as the financier of the immigrant caravan, a deep-state presence in the federal bureaucracy and the hidden hand behind the protests against Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
In Europe, the effort to demonize him has been fueled by nationalist leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and politicians in formerly communist countries like Macedonia, Albania and Russia. “He’s a banker, he’s Jewish, he gives to Democrats — he’s sort of a perfect storm for vilification by the right, here and in Europe,” said Michael H. Posner, a former State Department official in the Obama administration.
Mr. Soros has given his main group, the Open Society Foundations, $ 32 billion for what it calls democracy- building efforts around the world. In addition, in the United States, Mr. Soros has personally contributed more than $75 million over the years to federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records.
That qualifies him as one of the top disclosed donors to American political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era, and it does not include the many millions more he has donated to political nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors.
Mr. Soros initially focused his ac- tivism on nurturing the democracies that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But as he has evolved in the United States into a more traditional political operator, conservatives have become increasingly driven to discredit him and the candidates and causes he supports, sometimes with imagery seen as anti- Semitic.
The closing advertisement for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Mr. Soros — as well as Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.
This year, Mr. Soros has been elevated by Mr. Trump and his allies to key roles in both the threat they say is posed by the Central Americans making their way toward the United States and what they characterized as Democratic “mobs” protesting the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The conservative legal organization Judicial Watch, which has received funding from major conservative donors, began an effort this year to expose United States government assistance for what the group considers Mr. Soros’s “far-left agenda” in South America and Eastern Europe.
Judicial Watch’s efforts pick up a theme pushed by Republican members of Congress who accuse Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations of using taxpayer funding to push a liberal agenda in Albania, Colombia, Macedonia and Romania. A spokeswoman for the Open Society Foundations said the programs in question focus on issues that are consistent with “American ideals,” like fighting corruption and promoting the rule of law
r. Soros was born into a Jewish family in Hungary, and survived the Nazi occupation as a child. After World War II, he fled to England as the Soviet Union consolidated control in his country. He worked as a railroad porter and studied at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by an Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, who wrote about the consequences of “closed” and “open” societies.
Mr. Soros’s investments in compa- nies and currencies proved lucrative, prompting The Economist to call him “surely the world’s most intriguing investor” in 1987.
Mr. Soros supported groups and individuals seeking to bring down Communism, including the Solidarity and Charter 77 movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The leaders of both groups would later lead their countries in the post- Communist era. In Hungary, Mr. Soros distributed photocopiers as a means to fight government censorship, and he paid for dissidents to study in the West. The recipients included a young Mr. Orban, then a liberal activist.a
After the end of the Cold War, Mr. Soros funded destitute Soviet scientists in Russia, paid for free school breakfasts for Hungarian children and set up a college, the.Central European University,Mthat later drew the ire of Mr. Orban’s government. In the United States, where Mr. Soros was granted citizenship in the 1960s, his efforts often won bipartisan applause. Mr. Soros, who at the time described himself as a political independent, was seen by anti- Communist Republicans as a fellow freedom fighter.
As his activities grew more prominent in Europe, and he began funding drug reform efforts in the United States, he started being cast in the 1990s as a central figure in a shadowy Jewish cabal by extremist figures such as the fascist presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and allies of repressive Eastern European leaders. The theories were initially confined to the anti- Semitic fringe, though Mr. Soros is not closely associated with Jewish or Israeli causes.
Mr. Soros first became a major target for Republicans when he donated $27 million in the 2004 election cycle to an effort to defeat President George W. Bush, whose administration he condemned for rushing to war in Iraq.
J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, suggested in 2003, as House speaker, that the money that Mr. Soros was spending to defeat Mr. Bush “could be drug money.”
And in 2010, the talk show host Glenn Beck accused Mr. Soros of “helping send the Jews to the death camps,” devoting episodes of his Fox News show to a series branding Mr. Soros a “puppet master” intent on engineering a coup in the United States.
“Back then, it was a handful of crackpots; it was considered fringe; and it was contained,” said David Brock, a self- described right-wing hit man who switched sides and started a fleet of liberal groups to track conservative disinformation. ( The groups have received money from Mr. Soros.) “But it started coming back with a vengeance during the 2016 campaign.”
Mr. Soros had expressed greater alarm about Mr. Trump than he had about Mr. Bush. When friends expressed concern for his safety after the pipe bomb news broke, Mr. Soros changed the subject to what he called “the damage” being done by the Trump administration, said his adviser, Michael Vachon.
Mr. Vachon said that Mr. Soros has drawn a connection from the president’s rhetorical attacks on his critics to the pipe bombs and the killing of 11 people on October 27 at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
In an email, Mr. Soros said he was grieving for the victims in Pittsburgh and their families. He added: “I came to this country to find refuge. I am deeply distressed that in America in 2018 Jews are being massacred just because they are Jewish.”
A top donor to the left has enemies across the globe.