How the Trump Campaign Spread a Dirty Meme About Protesters Paid by Clinton, Sanders, and Soros
Robert Mackey
Apr. 3 2016, 10:56 a.m.
THREE WEEKS AGO, when Donald Trump called off a rally in Chicago because hundreds of protesters managed to crash the party, a more introspective candidate might have asked himself what he had done to inspire such loathing.
Instead, Trump seized on a more comforting explanation: The young people who refused to let him speak must have been dispatched by his rival insurgent, Bernie Sanders.
One of Trump’s oldest political confidants, the former Nixon aide Roger Stone, developed a far more elaborate conspiracy theory. Stone, who has advised Trump off and on for decades, and has devoted himself to spreading rumor and innuendo about Hillary Clinton for nearly as long, rushed to Twitter to share his big idea: that the protesters must have been covert operatives for the Clinton campaign, paid to both impersonate Sanders supporters and provoke violence from Trump’s fans.
Given that Stone began his own career by going undercover for the notorious Committee for the Re-Election of the President in 1972, it is perhaps not surprising that he thinks he sees dirty tricks wherever he looks. As Jeffrey Toobin explained in the New Yorker:
He was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to “prove” that Nixon’s adversary was a left-wing stooge. Stone hired another Republican operative, who was given the pseudonym Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign.
The day after the canceled Trump rally, Stone found a way to present his Clinton theory to a much wider audience, giving an interview on the subject to Alex Jones, the conspiratorial radio host, that was viewed more than 300,000 times on Facebook.
Jones, a die-hard supporter of Trump who previously helped found the “9/11 Truth” movement, told his viewers that Stone had “sources inside” the covert operation who had confirmed to him that the disruption at the University of Illinois at Chicago was “a false flag.”
“These demonstrators are flying under a false banner: They are not Sanders supporters by and large,” Stone said. “This is an operation directed by supporters of Hillary Clinton, paid for by George Soros and MoveOn.”
Soros, a billionaire, is a favorite target of internet conspiracy theorists across the globe, particularly anti-Semites, since he uses his money to support activists from MoveOn.org and other civil society groups in the United States and abroad. Ken Zimmerman, director of U.S. programs for Soros’s Open Society Foundations, told The Intercept that the organization “does not fund people to take to the streets to protest against any individual, Donald Trump or otherwise.”
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