Trump Repeats a Centuries-Old Antisemitic Conspiracy on National Television

In the first half of a two-part interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump stated that “people you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows” are “controlling” Joe Biden “like a puppet.” Even Ingraham, a far-right pundit, noted that this sounded like a conspiracy theory and asked Trump who he thought was “pulling Biden’s strings.” Trump replied that he was referring to “people that you haven’t heard of, there are people that are on the streets, people that are controlling the streets.”

The notion that a shadowy group of people are working behind the scenes to control world events, governments, or political movements is a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy — one promoted in the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that has been used to incite violence against Jews and others.

Trump’s characterization of Biden as a “puppet” is very much in line with the broader Republican Party’s messaging for the 2020 presidential election, which has presented Biden as the “puppet of Bernie [Sanders].”

The "puppet-master” characterization has been used to present Jews as shadowy manipulators, secretly orchestrating events on the political or financial main stage. This is very much the vague description of Biden’s alleged “controllers” that Trump offered in his interview with Ingraham. The image of a shadowy Jewish cabal has been used for decades in antisemitic propaganda:

A close-up of a Polish 1920s-era antisemitic propaganda poster depicting a Jewish shadow behind a Satan-like character drawn with exaggerated facial features.

On the left, a cartoon from Nazi-occupied Serbia in 1941, depicting a Jewish man as a puppet-master controlling both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. On the right, a cartoon from Ben Garrison in 2017, depicting Jewish philanthropist George Soros as a puppet-master controlling Generals David Patreus and H.R. McMaster. Soros himself is drawn as a marionette controlled by an arm coming out of the shadows. The arm is labeled “Rothschilds,” a reference to a wealthy Jewish family that, even before Soros, was used for decades as an allegory for Jewish power and control. Garrison, the cartoonist who created the 2017 image, was once invited to the Trump White House’s social media summit before public outcry caused the administration to rescind the invitation.