Trump and Musk Are Suffering From Soros Derangement Syndrome

For anyone trying to win or hold onto power, the only thing more debilitating than not knowing your enemy is persuading yourself that you have no enemy. Or, as is the case for President Trump and his allies, persuading yourselves that your opponents, somehow, do not really exist.

Now, it is obvious that Trump sees a world of elites aligned against him. That is part of why he has launched a war on the capacity of those people to oppose him and his agenda. (The other reason is pure retribution and spite.)

“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,” my newsroom colleagues Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher report. Trump promised to “expose” his political enemies using the resources of the Justice Department. His chief deputy, Elon Musk, has encouraged his fellow travelers in the administration to investigate ActBlue, a donation platform that serves as critical infrastructure for the Democratic Party. The Trump administration is also going after Democratic-aligned lawyers and law firms that the president believes are hostile to his interests.

But there is also a context to these attacks that you cannot immediately glean from the president’s language, even when he is ranting and raving against his perceived enemies. For that context, you have to look to how the larger right wing talks about left-wing and liberal political opposition, especially opposition to Trump.

During the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd, a major refrain from the political right was that this was the work of outside agitators and saboteurs. “80% of the RIOTERS in Minneapolis last night were from OUT OF STATE. They are harming businesses (especially African American small businesses), homes, and the community of good, hardworking Minneapolis residents who want peace, equality, and to provide for their families,” Trump said at the time, adding: “It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left. Don’t lay the blame on others!”

Some individuals and groups on the right claimed that George Soros, the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist, was directly funding the protesters. Rudy Giuliani even went as far as to suggest that there was “coordination” and a “guiding hand,” turning his attention to Soros and, like Trump, “antifa,” in a conversation with Sebastian Gorka, a fellow Trump adviser and conspiracist, then out of the government. And some conservative groups purchased online ads that called on law enforcement authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”