When it comes to promoting conspiracy theories, Donald Trump Jr. seems to take after his father.
As Roseanne Barr embarked on a Tuesday morning Twitter barrage that led ABC to cancel her sitcom, the president’s son retweeted two of her posts attacking billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, including one that called Soros, a Holocaust survivor, “a Nazi.”
An earlier Barr tweet with a racist slur against former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was cited by the network when it pulled the plug on its top-rated show. Barr has since deleted the tweet, which referred to Jarrett, who is African-American, as the offspring of the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.”
Trump Jr. did not retweet that one.
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Donald Trump Jr., Roseanne Barr (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Carolyn Kaster/AP, Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
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A spokesman for Soros said Barr’s “false allegations are insulting to the victims of the Holocaust” and “an affront to Mr. Soros & his family, who against the odds managed to survive.”
Right-wing conspiracy theories portraying Soros — who is Jewish and was 9 years old when World War II began — as a Nazi collaborator have become internet staples. Propagated by the likes of former Fox News host Glenn Beck, actor James Wood, and conservative commentators Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza and Mike Cernovich, that belief has become an article of faith in some Republican quarters.
But after Beck devoted a show to exposing what he believed to be the secret truth about Soros, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman issued a statement calling the segment “repugnant.”
“For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific,” Foxman wrote. “While I, too, may disagree with many of Soros’ views and analysis on the issues, to bring in this kind of innuendo about his past is unacceptable. To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”
Investor, business magnate, philanthropist and political activist George Soros has been a target of right-wing conspiracy theories. (Photo: Olivier Hoslet, EPA via AP)
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Trump Jr., like his father, has a well-documented history of retweeting or liking politically divisive messages on Twitter, as he did in February when he liked a message on the platform that promoted a conspiracy theory about 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, or when, in 2016, Trump Jr. retweeted an attack on Hillary Clinton by Kevin MacDonald, who the Times of Israel called a “psychologist notorious for his theories of Jewish manipulation and control.”