Trump 2020 Campaign Uses Antisemitic Tropes, Calls Biden a "Puppet" of Jewish Senator Bernie Sanders
The rapid response social media channel for the Trump 2020 campaign, the “Trump War Room,” cast Bernie Sanders as a puppet master pulling Joe Biden’s strings.
The Trump War Room account shared a CNN clip of congressional candidate Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) speaking about about the coalition forming to support Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. In the clip, Bowman said that “the Bernie Sanders-Joe Biden alliance came together.”
Describing Bowman as an “extremist,” the War Room account stated: “Joe Biden is a puppet on strings pulled by radical socialists in the Democrat party,” a clear reference to Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist and the most famous Jewish politician in the United States.
Biden’s candidacy poses a problem for the Trump administration, which seeks to fear-monger before its base about the threats of socialism, open borders, and Left political realignment. In order to continue promoting this narrative, the campaign is seeking to cast Biden as the puppet of national, non-Christian and non-white leaders who represent those threats for the Republican base: the Jewish Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Latina Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Coretez (D-NY).
The “puppet-master” characterization is a long-standing antisemitic trope used to present Jews as shadowy manipulators, secretly orchestrating world events on the political or financial main stage. Jewish philanthropist George Soros has long been depicted by right-wing pundits and politicians as a literal puppet-master controlling Democrats, social movements, and global incidents. This is one of the very conspiracies invoked by the Tree of Life shooter before he committed the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. As the 2018 Tree of Life shooting made all too painfully clear, the puppet-master trope can have material and even deadly consequences.
Given the Trump campaign’s frequent use of Nazi imagery and the Trump administration’s embrace of white nationalist talking points, there is little reason to give the Trump War Room any benefit of the doubt as to the intentionality of this reference. That is even more so the case given the Republican Party’s repeated use of this exact trope.