Trump sets sights on liberal megadonor George Soros: ‘A chilling message to other donors’

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said “everything is on the table” and left it there. But Donald Trump threw discretion to the wind and was far more specific about his choice of enemy to go after.

“If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” the US president said.

The gathering with reporters took place in the Oval Office last month as Trump ordered a crackdown on “leftwing terrorism” and threatened to investigate and prosecute those who financially support it.

There is no evidence linking George Soros, a 95-year-old billionaire who has supported democratic causes around the world, or Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal and the networking site LinkedIn, to terrorism. But both are top donors to the Democratic party. And both were named by Trump as potential participants in a vast conspiracy to finance violent protesters against the government.

It is no coincidence, critics say, that the president is intensifying his attacks on Soros little more than a year before the midterm elections for Congress. The billionaire has reportedly contributed more than $170m to help Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle. A justice department investigation could deter both Soros and other would-be donors in 2026.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Anyone who contributes to the Democrats can expect Soros treatment if they’re giving a large amount of money. We’ve seen Trump quite skillfully using intimidation and threats to bring prominent law firms, major universities and others to their knees. This is another effort to cower opposition. The point here is to make it harder for Democrats to raise money.”

Soros has long been a go-to bogeyman for the right. He was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930 and emigrated to London after surviving the Nazi occupation of his home country. He moved to New York and, in 1970, founded Soros Fund Management, which grew into one of the most successful hedge funds in history. In 1992, he was dubbed the “man who broke the Bank of England” after short-selling $10bn worth of British pounds during the UK’s currency crisis.

A protester holds a placard accusing Soros of funding the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, in New York on 22 March 2023. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Soros began philanthropic work in the late 1970s, funding scholarships for Black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he provided support to dissidents and pro-democracy groups in communist eastern Europe. This work evolved into the Open Society Foundations (OSF), now one of the biggest funders of groups that support human rights, government transparency, public health and education in more than a hundred countries.

Soros has donated more than $32bn to the OSF but in 2023 handed over its stewardship to his son Alex, who this summer married Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton and herself the target of rightwing conspiracy theories. Within the US, the OSF has supported groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Equal Justice Initiative, Indivisible, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, the National Immigration Law Center and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Patrick Gaspard, who was president of the OSF from 2017 to 2020, coinciding with Trump’s first term, said: “It’s hard to believe but at one point George’s work had bipartisan support. Republican senators and Congress members would meet with George Soros regularly, openly. They would tout his work in helping to bring down the iron curtain and help instill democracy in western Europe. They were proud to have the association.”

That changed in 2004, when, disenchanted by the Iraq war, Soros emerged as a major backer of Democratic candidate John Kerry during his unsuccessful presidential campaign against George W Bush. He has since been a major donor to Democrats, giving $125m to one liberal Super Pac in 2021, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.

Republicans have megadonors of their own, including Miriam Adelson, Charles Koch, Timothy Mellon and Elon Musk, whose donation of more than $270m to Trump’s presidential campaign dwarfed Soros’s input. Even so, Soros’s influence has made him a frequent target of criticism and conspiracy theories, especially from rightwing groups and authoritarian governments.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, posted on the X social media platform in 2023: “No other person has undermined our democracy more than George Soros. Why is [he] still allowed to maintain his citizenship?”

The critiques often play on antisemitic tropes. Emily Tankin, author of The Influence of Soros, said: “You couldn’t imagine a more perfect cartoon villain than Soros because he’s a foreigner, he works in finance, he lives in New York and, I would say most saliently, he’s Jewish, which means that you can have all sorts of stereotypes and conspiracies take hold without ever saying the word ‘Jewish’.”

When Trump ally Viktor Orbán of Hungary was running for re-election in 2018, he targeted Soros with antisemitic dog whistles, saying: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”

A billboard in 2028 in Budapest, Hungary, reads: 'Soros wants to transplant millions from Africa and the Middle East."’ Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters

Tankin added: “This idea of the rootless cosmopolitan or the greedy New Yorker obsessed with money. ‘Globalist’ is one you’re hearing a lot. I don’t ever need to say the word ‘Jew’ for antisemitic synapses to light up, which helps these conspiracies travel extremely effectively. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now in the United States and we should be clear about that.”

Soros has long been considered a villain by Trump and his conservative base. In August, the president said without evidence that Soros and his son should be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico, because of their alleged support for violent protests.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the justice department has directed prosecutors to consider possible charges against the Open Society Foundations. Soros’s office sent a letter to “friends and colleagues” stating: “Allegations that George or OSF are in any way engaged in unlawful activity or in fomenting or promoting violence are 100% false.”

Then, in the wake of charges against former FBI director James Comey, came Trump’s remarks in the Oval Office, suggesting that Soros and Hoffman could be prosecuted for sponsoring “professional anarchists and agitators”. There is no evidence to support these claims.

Gaspard is not surprised that Trump is once again seeking to demonise George and Alex Soros. “Everyone knows – you can set your clock to it – that when the midterm elections come, when the presidential elections come, that family is going to be involved in some fashion in politics with capital ‘D’ Democrats,” he said.

“Trump and those around him are interested in making the name toxic, the investments toxic, and to then find ways to destabilise what should be a source of strength for progressives and the centre left. Then this thing happens where the work of the philanthropy gets conflated with the rights of the individual to participate in American politics and to invest in national politics. That conflation is dangerous.”

The move against Soros comes as Republicans face an uphill battle in next year’s midterms, when the party that holds the White House traditionally suffers losses. The jobs market is showing significant signs of weakening, consumer prices remain stubbornly high and this week the federal government shut down.

But Trump has already intervened to protect his allies in Congress by pushing for the redrawing of congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and ordering the justice department to investigate ActBlue, the Democrats’ prime fundraising tool. The assault on Soros could be aimed at choking off money from bigger donors.

Rick Wilson, a cofounder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Right now Trump’s in a lot of trouble across the board politically: the job situation is terrible, the economy is crashing out, the Epstein files are still dividing the party. All these things have led to a moment where they need some bait and they need some distraction out there.

“Soros is a great target for that and I’m sure it’s also trying to send a chilling message to any other Democratic donor that they should watch out or he’ll go after them. If they don’t avoid transgressing against Trump, they’ll be in the same spot that Soros finds himself in.”

Wilson, a former Republican strategist, added: “It’s absolutely about scaring people and freaking people out and causing fear and suppressing free speech. They do not want people to fund campaigns or Super Pacs or organisations that oppose Trump or Trumpism or their movement and so they’re going to seek to punish people and scare them off.”