If you were dumb and sad enough a person to only get your political news from Trump fundraising emails you might be forgiven for thinking that Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros was a prosecutor. Fully half – 28 – of the 56 fundraising emails sent over the last few weeks include the word “Soros” in them. Subject lines like “Soros’ witch hunt already BACKFIRED,” “The Soros prosecutor is NOT giving up,” “Soros will HATE to hear this,” have appeared on the notifications of probably tens of millions of Trump fans who subscribe to his non-stop horseshit fundraising emails just in the last few days. Trump’s actual rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Once.

“Smiling George Soros as a glowing galactic viking space warrior with a huge cyber sword leading an army into battle” via Midjourney AI

And that was just in an email recapping Trump’s Truth Social posts. One of which this week called his not-yet-official opponent in the 2024 GOP primary “Ron DeSoros.” Then there was the “SOROS BACKED ANIMAL” insanity from Thursday, among over a dozen posts this month mentioning Soros.

It wasn’t always like this. The first Trump fundraising email containing the word “Soros” wasn’t sent until January 27th. The first Trump Truth Social post with the name not until a few days later on February 1st. Tweets prior to his not-actually-lifetime ban from the now Elon Musk-owned platform?

One… well, three if you count the retweets. This is a guy who wrote more than 20,000 tweets between January 2016 and January 2021 and he mentioned Soros once on his own, just saying he had paid for signs printed by pro-choicers protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.

Not exactly the most sinister thing to accuse Soros of. That month, October 2018, was a pretty fucking heated time in American politics and Soros’s name got thrown around quite a lot. Fox News was wall-to-wall on that “Caravan” freakout, blaming guess-who as being behind it. Then the MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc made Soros a primary early target in his incompetently-executed mail bombing campaign. Then hardcore antisemite Robert Bowers slaughtered 11 worshippers – Soros’s fellow Holocaust survivors among them – at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh SPECIFICALLY because he thought Soros was funding the caravan as part of a plot to wipeout white Christians.

A few days later a reporter asked Trump if he agreed with the idea that Soros had funded the caravan. “I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes,” he said. Again this was AFTER that sick fucking asshole had murdered Jews in retaliation for that conspiracy theory. But outside that statement and the one tweet earlier in the month (plus the two retweets in June and October of 2020), it would appear the Orange Tyrant was mostly mute on Soros until this year.

Where to start with how that contrasts with Trump’s fans. George Soros been on the right wing’s radar for nearly 20 years, starting with the 2004 election when he spent $23 million on 527 groups trying to defeat George W Bush (actually slightly surprising on the other hand, you would figure a now-92 year old man would’ve been on the scene decades earlier than that). In 2010, former Fox News star propagandist Glenn Beck called Soros Obama’s “puppet-master” in a deeply antisemitic multi-part “exposé” accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator. In 2011 Reuters reported some conservatives were accusing Soros of backing the Occupy Wall Street protests. In 2014 Roger Ailes accused Vanity Fair reporter Gabe Sherman of being paid by Soros to write his book “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country.”

We’re merely scratching the surface here of pre-Trump Soros-mania on the right. Glenn Beck’s special definitely elevated him from simply another villainous Dem donor to basically Satan himself.

But show us an example from before the Trump years of a Republican Congressman asking the same question about the Occupy Wall Street protests. Show us an example of George W Bush shittalking Soros and blaming him for the 2008 stock market crash. Show us an example of Soros being blamed for the 2013 Ebola outbreak. Show us an example of anything (besides Glenn Beck’s special) from before Trump that rivals the fixation on Soros that surged after the Donald got elected.

We would especially be interested in seeing something having as significant of an effect on public policy as the Gateway Pundit’s hawking of Soros conspiracy theories has with the now-accelerating collapse of the interstate Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) with now Iowa and Ohio joining Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, and Alabama leaving the compact within the last few months. Alaska and Texas are also eyeing the exit, while Arizona Republicans are working on a bill to do so as well. Credit where credit’s due, and you can thank the Gateway Pundit for highlighting Soros’s very indirect role in the founding of a system designed to prevent people from voting in more than one state in any given election like those MAGA assholes in The Villages, Florida were caught doing.

Being woke is a religious cult.

Bowing to the false god of social, racial, and climate justice in the freest country in the world is a fools pursuit.

It leads to devastating socialism and communism, or some awful form of both.

George Soros is the father of it and he funds it.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 18, 2021

Someone very clever and insightful once took a look at QAnon and wrote something along the lines of: Trump sucked so badly as president that his fans had to come up with a fictional role-playing game where he was secretly fighting a worldwide cabal of pedophiles to justify their support for him.

On the opposite side – and not just confined to QAnon – they needed villains, and who better than a wealthy Jew very open about using his money to influence public affairs? It starts with the reality that George Soros is legitimately an antagonist to them politically, having spent and continuing to spend hundreds of millions on Democratic candidates and causes – of course none of their complaining about that gets into anything about massive campaign finance reform that would reduce the role of or remove money entirely from politics. Then it might dip into Soros’s not-totally-ethical career in finance, like the time he shorted the British pound and made $1 billion off the collapse of its value in 1992 – and again, we’d love them to tell us about a major Republican donor who can be described as a virtuous saint and not a similarly rapacious capitalist.

There’s his vaguely sci-fi Greek mythological-sounding palindromic name: Soros. Two syllables, short and easy to write, rolls off the tongue easy. Much easier than the original Schwartz.

He’s perfect in so many ways for life’s losers to find someone to blame whenever their cult isn’t “winning.” It must feel great for them to take it further when they repeat the heinous lie that Soros, as a 14 year-old boy hiding in Nazi-occupied Budapest “collaborated” with them and has similarly genocidal ambitions for white, Christian Americans now in the 21st century.

There’s something so on-brand about Trump waiting until it was him personally under threat from a “Soros-backed prosecutor” to fully jump on the bandwagon when his base have been at it for more than a decade. You will not be shocked to learn that Trump and his buddies are blowing the connection between Soros and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg way, way out of proportion. The two men have never met or even spoken to each other, a Soros aide told CNBC this week. The thread starts with Soros’s contribution $1 million in 2021 to a racial justice PAC called “Color of Change” which then spent about $500,000 to back Bragg’s candidacy. And that’s it. More Russian money went (indirectly, at least) to elect Trump in 2016 than Soros money did to elect Bragg in 2021.

But let’s be fair here. Trump and his minions aren’t the only ones exaggerrating the influence George Soros wields over the American political system, especially when it comes to internet shiposting.

How could anyone not fully embrace George Soros as a meme after being baselessly accused of being paid by him to mock Trump and his fans? The TEAM SOROS™ part of my name was so dumb and simple only a MAGA chode could get offended by it. And by God they did. No sense in not continuing it into the National Zero era (and don’t spoil the winner of the 2023 Person of The Year).

And no shame in admitting my mostly sincere admiration for the man pretty much entirely came after joining the “team.” George Soros is genuinely a friend to progressive causes. A generous one too, who’s particularly focused on voting rights and democracy. Who wouldn’t want someone like that on their side? But at the end of the day it’s way, way, way more about pissing the other guys off than it is promoting Soros’s (very outsized) importance bankrolling Democrats.

TEAM SOROS™ forever.