Former President Donald Trump on Jan. 28, 2023. Photo by Sam Wolfe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By Jacob Kornbluh February 9, 2023

Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, assailed Jewish billionaire George Soros in a series of fundraising emails, accusing him of aiming to “single-handedly buy” President Joe Biden’s reelection. 

“Please make a contribution to help me FIGHT BACK against Soros and the Left’s money machine as they attempt to BUY a second term for Biden,” Trump wrote in an email to supporters Thursday, raising funds for his joint fundraising committee, Donald J. Trump for President 2024 and Save America. 

The Hungarian-born Democratic megadonor and Holocaust survivor has long been the target of antisemitic tropes and touted as a boogeyman by the far right. Casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes is a common antisemitic trope.

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Soros was the top political donor in the midterm elections last year, investing more than $170 million to help Democratic candidates, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics. The Soros-backed nonprofit, Open Society Policy Center, invested $140 million into advocacy organizations and ballot initiatives in 2021. 

“If you question the effectiveness of Soros’ war chest, just look at what he’s done to our once beautiful cities all across the country,” the fundraising email read. “We can’t underestimate just how far Soros and the Left will go to DESTROY our great nation.” 

The attack on Soros comes as Trump is struggling to raise campaign cash for his 2024 bid and as other candidates are preparing to challenge him for the nomination.

In the final days of the 2016 presidential election campaign, Trump was criticized by the ADL for running a TV ad with flashing images of Jewish financial figures, which accused him of peddling anti-Jewish stereotypes to motivate his far-right supporters. In 2020, Trump’s campaign suggested Jewish billionaires were funding efforts to rig the election.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy came under fire in 2018 after tweeting that Soros, with former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and others, was trying to “buy” the midterm elections. He later deleted the post.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America said on Twitter, “Just because accusing Jewish donors of buying elections has become part of Donald Trump’s regular vocabulary, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous each time he does it.”

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