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As a former federal prosecutor, I know that prosecutors should be guided by the facts. But in his determination to hound George Soros, Donald Trump wants prosecutors to become agents of his personal vendetta, facts be damned. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the instructions issued by one of Trump’s senior justice department officials to a group of US attorney’s offices across the country, telling them to investigate Soros’s foundation.
This is the latest step in Trump’s implementation of the autocrat’s handbook, with the aim of chipping away at the checks and balances on presidential authority. Having already attacked judges, lawyers, media companies and universities, Trump now sets his sights on civil society. Soros, a longtime and extraordinarily generous funder of progressive causes around the world including in the United States, is Target Number 1. Trump shares this fixation with the likes of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent autocrat, who for years has used Soros as a scapegoat for widespread and growing dislike of his corrupt, self-serving rule.
As the name of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) suggests, he promotes the free and public exchange of ideas. Soros made his billions by recognizing that markets are fallible. He gave away billions based on the insight that human governance is imperfect, too, and that the best way to compensate is with independent voices engaged in free debate. Having survived as a Jewish boy in Hungary under Nazi rule, Soros understands that we are safer when people can contest government dogma.
Soros has funded not only human rights activists who defend open societies but also intellectuals and journalists who have pushed the limits of public debate, as well as organizations devoted to redressing a range of injustices. My former organization, Human Rights Watch, was and remains a major beneficiary.
Despite his brilliance, Soros is too modest to believe he has the ultimate answers to society’s most vexing problems. He is always self-critical, deeply aware of his inability to see the full truth, skeptical of any moment’s conventional wisdom.
At age 95, he has stepped back from an active role in his foundation, which is now chaired by his son Alex. But his vision still guides the foundation and is antithetical to Trump’s delusional belief that he alone is the guardian of all wisdom while critics are to be demonized and persecuted. Soros has the self-confidence to eschew the kinds of sycophantic lackeys whom Trump prefers.
The debate that Soros has long promoted is peaceful. That is the essence of the open society that he champions. OSF recently reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”
But that has not stopped Trump from insinuating without evidence that Soros and OSF are somehow supporters of people who engage in political violence. I have known Soros for more than three decades and have never seen a hint of that. It is the opposite of who he is. But stubborn reality has never impeded Trump and his acolytes in their universe of “alternative facts”.
Straining to justify the vendetta, Trump’s justice department points to a report issued by a group that calls itself the Capital Research Center. It is filled with tendentious, McCarthyite allusions about OSF grantees having alleged sympathy for Hamas or tolerance of “direct action”, a supposed allusion to violence.
One of the prominent examples it cites is OSF’s funding of the highly respected Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, one of six Palestinian organizations that the Israeli government in 2021 designated as supposed terrorists. But the Israeli government bandies about accusations of terrorism the same way it tries to silence critics with false allegations of antisemitism. I have worked with Al-Haq throughout my career and have always known it to be a fact-based, principled, and peaceful organization that fairly and objectively investigates and reports on Israeli abuses in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Another OSF grantee targeted is the human rights group Dawn, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government. One of its stated offenses is that while it condemned Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, it focused on the civilian, not the military, victims.
That such “evidence” might tempt Trump to order criminal charges against Soros under his newly announced effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence” means that almost anyone could be targeted.
In persecuting Soros, Trump has taken on a tough target. Like Harvard, which successfully sued rather than capitulate, Soros has the means to fight back. Moreover, unlike some law firms that cut deals with Trump to escape his wrath, 100 progressive foundations have announced that they will mount a common defense if any of them faces Trump’s vengeance. That mutual support is the right response to Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.
I would expect that the courts will promptly dismiss any action that Trump takes against Soros. Despite Trump’s efforts to bully them, federal judges have maintained their independence, and many continue to apply the law rather than Trump’s dictates. A fact-free prosecution of a well-known critic is a recipe for judicial rejection.
But that doesn’t relieve Soros and his foundation from the burden of defending themselves from fabricated charges, which can be substantial. Trump’s abuse of his power to persecute an independent voice – his posturing to his base in utter contempt of the first amendment – should be widely and firmly denounced. Unless the pushback is intense enough, Soros may be Trump’s first civilian target but not the last.
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Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments is published by Knopf and Allen Lane
