'Not just bad but vile’: Expert warns Trump’s coded campaign tactic is about to turn ugly
Former President Donald Trump for years has been quietly relying on a subtle campaign tactic that has quietly fueled unrest at a frightening pace, according to a new in-depth expose from the New York Times.
The Times Thursday exposed what they describe as the coded anti-Semitic messaging Trump uses to quietly signal his support to White nationalists nationwide.
“It’s turning very ugly,” Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, Bloomington, told the New York Times. “It’s not just bad, it’s vile.”
The Times scoured through hundreds of Trump campaign emails looking for references to Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros and warnings about the threat of “globalism.”
They found a message behind a message.
While Trump recently declared that President Joe Biden “HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people,” they also found Trump spreading a centuries-old conspiracy theory with a dark message behind it: “a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.”
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Trump is not the only Republican pointing the finger at Democrats with one hand and silently signaling to White Nationalists with the other, according to the report.
“Amid the widening protests and the unease, if not fear, among many Jews, Republicans have sought to seize the political advantage by portraying themselves as the true protectors of Israel and Jews under assault from the progressive left,” the report states. “For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.”
The formula sees Republicans blaming an elite “ruling class” for red-alert conservative concerns that include Black Lives Matter, immigration across the southern border, and even Trump’s ongoing trial in New York City.
“In a July 2023 email to supporters, the Trump campaign employed an image that bears striking resemblance to a Nazi-era cartoon of a hook-nosed puppet master manipulating world figures: Mr. Soros as puppet master, pulling the strings controlling President Biden,” the Times reports. “Mr. Trump’s targeting of Mr. Soros escalated in the run-up to his indictment last April in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star who claimed they had had a sexual encounter. Mr. Trump said the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, had been ‘handpicked and funded by George Soros,’ an allegation then amplified by Trump acolytes.”
These comments are landing with notorious white nationalists who support Trump such as Nick Fuentes and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, the report notes.
Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times he believes Trump and fellow Republicans “are presenting themselves as committed to fighting antisemitism, but they’re actually mainstreaming some of the most antisemitic ideas in circulation today.”