Financier and philanthropist George Soros. Photo: Reuters/Lisi Niesner

Former US President Donald Trump was under fire on Thursday over a campaign fundraising email depicting the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros as a puppet master controlling the Biden Administration from the shadows.

A crude graphic dispatched to supporters from Trump’s campaign to return to the White House in 2024 showed the 92-year-old Soros with an outstretched hand dangling Biden from a set of puppet strings. An accompanying text had Biden saying, “I thought when I got to be President, I’d get to give orders. But, I take more orders than I ever did.” A large Chinese flag is placed in the background behind Soros.

While the graphic contains no obviously Jewish images or symbols, Jewish groups and several commentators pointed out that the display is essentially a “dog whistle” — invoking age-old antisemitic tropes about shadowy Jewish control of finance and media through the person of one of the best-known Jewish financiers in the world. Soros, who survived the Nazi Holocaust as a child, has increasingly become a central hate figure for nationalist conservatives around the world, particularly in his native Hungary, where the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has long promoted the anti-Soros campaign now being emulated by Trump.

In a tweet responding to the Soros image, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described it as not “just disturbing, it’s indisputably dangerous and reprehensible.”

“Let’s be clear, these are antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and are a gateway into hardcore antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the ADL declared, noting as well that the Trump campaign continues to send fundraising emails “that feature language and imagery of George Soros controlling puppet strings and secret globalist cabals.”

Others commenting on the image included Alex Hearn — a British journalist and member of the group Labour Against Antisemitism (LAS), which has pushed back against antisemitism on the far left of the British Labour Party. Hearn argued that while criticism of Soros is not antisemitic per se, Trump’s graphic utilized “an idea popularized by the Nazis…’a secret shadow president behind the curtain pulling the strings’.” In a further tweet that showed the image of Soros alongside antisemitic caricatures from the previous century, Hearn commented: “It is the fantasy of the evil Jew secretly running the world by undermining countries. That is why it looks so similar to Nazi propaganda.”

Trump is sending out fundraiser emails using an idea popularised by the Nazis. He uses Soros accompanied by the text:

“a secret shadow president behind the curtain pulling the strings” pic.twitter.com/fTJonjs3Eg

— Alex Hearn (@hearnimator) July 12, 2023

Attacks on Soros and the alleged impact of his financial heft have been a regular feature of Trump’s campaign. A fundraising email sent in February decried Soros as a “left-wing billionaire” who “thinks he can single-handedly BUY Joe Biden’s second term.” The following month,  an email from Trump appealed to “patriots“, claiming: “I’m now being ATTACKED for exposing George Soros and the millions and millions of dollars he’s spent to BUY the White House. But let me be perfectly clear: I WILL NOT BE SILENCED for calling out the billionaire puppeteer who has wreaked havoc on our borders, our justice system and our nation.”

While Trump’s term in office was marked by an unabashedly pro-Israel policy that included moving the US Embassy in the Jewish state from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his association with far right figures and willingness to adopt far right memes has alarmed many in the Jewish community. Last November, Jewish groups including the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) slammed Trump for hosting the antisemitic hip-hop mogul Kanye West and his sidekick Nick Fuentes, an outspoken Holocaust denier, at his Mar a Lago resort in Florida.

In 2019 — three years before his meeting with Trump — Fuentes used the “analogy” of “baked cookies” to dispute the number of Jews killed  in the Holocaust.

“How long would it take you to make 6 million? Hmm, I don’t know, it certainly wouldn’t be five years, right? The math doesn’t seem to add up…. I don’t think you’d result in 6 million, maybe 200,000-300,000 cookies,” he said.