Few Republican tropes are as overused as the George Soros boogeyman.
When it comes to right-wing conspiracies, the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire and philanthropist is the tried-and-true secret ingredient to give any conspiracy theory legs, no matter how absurd.
He’s like The Dude’s rug in The Big Lebowski—really tying the room together. Just add “Soros-backed,” and watch it all magically, and antisemitically, come together.
For instance, did your favorite ex-president get indicted for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payout to a porn star? There’s a Soros for that.
Did a band of your favorite ex-president’s supporters launch a deadly pro-Nazi rally a few months after he was elected? There’s a Soros for that.
Was your favorite ex-president’s Supreme Court nominee credibly accused of sexual assault? There’s a Soros for that.
Are asylum-seekers attempting to seek refuge in your country, as sanctioned by international law? There’s a Soros for that.
And so on and so forth.
While “Soros-backed” conspiracy theories are most dangerous because of their antisemitism, they also all share a common construction—that the mere involvement of Soros, even several degrees removed from the issue at hand, is enough to make any matter entirely illegitimate.
Trump himself has regularly invoked the Soros bogeyman, including in multiple social media posts and statements as president, and most recently as the shadowy financier supposedly behind progressive local prosecutors who have been targeting him.
And of course, Trump has exploited Soros mania to raise money.
But it turns out that Trump, along with a slew of Republican officials and groups, is by his own definition also “Soros-backed.” And unlike those right-wing conspiracy theories, this one isn’t a stretch.
This month, Trump will attend a South Carolina fundraiser co-hosted by the man who literally ran Soros Fund Management for years—a man who has been described as a Soros “protege,” who amassed billions of dollars for the Soros empire, and who left in 2015 to launch his own investment fund with $2 billion in founding money from none other than George Soros.
That fundraiser’s name is Scott Bessent.
For years, Bessent played a central role in building the fortune that has fueled Soros’ political and charitable funding—which, to be sure, has been one of the most influential forces underwriting Democratic politics and liberal policymaking over the last decade, if not the most influential.
Billionaire financier George Soros speaks to Reuters in New York.
But Bessent himself has funneled millions of Soros-sourced dollars into politics, Federal Election Commission data shows, and has demonstrated an increasingly conservative bent over time. He’s contributed $2.7 million to federal political campaigns and committees since 1995, with nearly all of it—more than $2.3 million—coming after Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015.
While some of that money has gone to Democratic candidates—including former President Barack Obama ($2,300) and $25,000 for a Hillary Clinton-aligned PAC in 2013—his donations have overwhelmingly supported Republicans.
A list of those “Soros-backed” GOP officials includes a number of prominent sitting senators, including J.D. Vance (R-OH), Rick Scott (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ted Budd (R-NC), John Kennedy (R-LA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Bessent has also given $176,500 to the GOP’s congressional re-election committee, as well as to former House Speaker John Boehner, with another $175,000 to its senatorial counterpart over the last two years.
Vance, Scott, Lee, Rubio, Cruz, Budd, Kennedy, Grassley, Graham, and McConnell have all politically attacked Soros. (After the 2020 election, Budd falsely suggested to Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Dominion voting machines may have Soros ties. One year later, the Charlotte Observer reported that Soros was a top investor in the Budd family business.)
The largest single Bessent beneficiary was Trump, however, with a flat $1 million charitable donation to the former president’s 2017 inauguration fund. The largest political recipient has been the Republican National Committee, which Bessent has given $928,000 since Trump was inaugurated. (Bessent’s 2017 RNC donations list his employer as “Soros Fund Management.”)
But Bessent only made his first contribution to Trump’s campaign last September—a $3,300 maximum gift for the primary, FEC records show. He has also funded some of Trump’s primary opponents, including max-outs to the failed presidential bids for both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott, along with a cool $325,000 to Nikki Haley’s political nonprofit, Politico reported. (DeSantis has repeatedly railed against Soros, while being suspected of acting as a Soros plant.)
Tim Scott, it turns out, will also be at the South Carolina fundraiser alongside Trump. The event, which was first reported by Puck News, is slated for Feb. 20. In addition to Trump himself, the event features prominent MAGA allies like South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, casino wheeler-dealer Wallace Cheves, Notre Dame football coaching legend Lou Holtz, and Sens. Scott and Lindsey Graham.
Graham, who has previously invoked Soros to defend Trump, has received more than $19,000 from Bessent since 2015. Scott, meanwhile, has clocked about $15,000.
The Daily Beast sent comment requests to Bessent and a Trump campaign spokesperson, but they did not immediately reply.
Bessent first entered Soros world in 1991, coming aboard the European fund. He stayed there for nine years, working his way up to managing director, later boasting that he’d achieved “a compound annual return of 30 [percent] in Europe on a capital base of $1 billion to $2 billion.” Crain’s New York business review later honored him as “one of the longest-running members of one of the most successful hedge fund groups of all time.”
When Soros shut down his Europe branch in 2000, he put Bessent in charge of $300 million—roughly a third of the assets in the central Soros fund. Bessent struck out on his own, but he returned to the fold in 2011 to serve as chief investment officer of that main operation, Soros Fund Management, where Soros entrusted him with a $25 billion portfolio. Bloomberg later reported that Bessent had earned the Soros family $10 billion in profits—or about 13 percent in annualized returns.
It was national news when Bessent left the Soros fund in the summer of 2015 to start his own hedge fund—Key Square Group—with a cush $2 billion investment loan from his old boss. In an internal memo at the time, Soros’ son, Robert Soros, told employees that Bessent “will continue to advise SFM on an informal basis,” assuring them that Bessent “remains close to George Soros and the Soros family.”
By 2018, Bessent had paid Soros back some of that $2 billion loan, Bloomberg reported. But by the end of 2017, Soros himself still had $853 million stashed in a managed account at Key Square Group, according to Bloomberg.
If Bessent has any compunctions about the epithets that his political allies have hurled at his former boss and close friend, that hasn’t stopped him from publicly advocating for Trump. Just last week, Bessent said that he’s bullish on a “Trump Rally” in the markets, if investors believe Trump will win in 2024, Bloomberg reported. (The markets have hit all-time highs during President Joe Biden’s term, including in recent weeks.)
But Bessent also recently found himself in the boomeranging anti-Soros backlash.
In 2021, he launched an independent publishing company called “All Seasons Press,” premised on boosting Trumpworld and Trump-adjacent figures. In November, conservative Jewish outlet Tablet published a long-form piece looking into the publication, citing “a funny habit of signing big-name MAGA authors to book contracts, then suing them.”
One lawsuit accused ASP of fraud, “concealing that the publisher to which he had sold a work critical of Soros, ‘globalists,’ and American high finance was in fact owned by a Soros protege and Wall Streeter with active investments in China,” Tablet reported. (The article was posted to the MAGA message board patriots.win.)
It doesn’t seem that Bessent’s presence and influence among GOP politicians will cause the same kind of stir as Trump’s repeated invocations of his old boss’ name. (Trump’s adult child, Donald Trump Jr., has shared a social media post calling Soros a “Nazi,” and his longtime friend and attorney Rudy Giuliani has called Soros the “antichrist.”)
In statements last year condemned as racist and anti-semitic, Trump raised the specter of Soros in connection to his Manhattan hush-money indictment, calling District Attorney Alvin Bragg an “animal” who was financed by Soros.
In September, Trump attacked Soros’ son, Alex Soros, in a social media post. “We can’t let this spoiled little degenerate win. His daddy controls the D.A.’s and A.G.’s in America. They are destroying our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “An EMBARRASSMENT to the Republican Party. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS!!!”
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