Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade peddling absurd claims about “paid protesters” — as if anyone who disagrees with him must necessarily be corrupt and inauthentic — and the president kept that push going in an awkwardly worded online statement last week.
“It’s just been found that the Democrats are buying protestors in order to fight my attack on crime,” the Republican wrote, using clumsy passive-voice phrasing. Predictably, he made no reference to any evidence or any effort to explain what, exactly, has been “found.”
A week later, the president seemed to go into a bit more detail this week. NBC News reported:
Trump said on Truth Social this morning that billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his son Alex Soros should be charged with racketeering. ‘George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America,’ Trump wrote. ... It’s unclear what protests Trump, who has repeatedly attacked the Soros family, was referring to or what prompted his post.
In the same online missive, Trump also wrote, in a message directed at a “friend” of Soros, “Be careful, we’re watching you!”
At this point, I could write a few hundred words about why the president’s allegations are ridiculous and why there’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest the Soros family or the Open Society Foundations have financed “violent protests” — but that’s unnecessary. Trump’s weird rants are not, in and of themselves, news, and unless the Justice Department actually launches some kind of baseless RICO investigation, there’s little value in trying to evaluate the merits of misguided nonsense.
What’s far more notable, however, is the larger context: Soros is a very wealthy supporter of progressive causes and Democratic electoral endeavors, which makes it that much more significant that our authoritarian president wants to see him prosecuted for crimes that don’t appear to have happened.
I’m reminded of an important observation The New York Times made in March: “Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.”
The evidence to bolster the point isn’t hard to find. After all, in recent months, the Trump administration has targeted leading Democratic officials the president doesn’t like; it’s also opened an investigation into Media Matters, which came on the heels of Trump directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s most important fundraising platform, all while targeting prominent Democratic supporters.
Now, abandoning subtlety about his authoritarian vision, Trump is calling for a leading progressive donor to be charged with racketeering, based on nothing whatsoever, sticking to the tyrants’ playbook about how to deal with political opposition.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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