Trump’s lawyers howl: Debunking their conspiracy theories

On Nov. 19, President Donald Trump’s legal team, led by racist former New York City Mayor Rudy Guliani, held a news conference to discuss the results of the recent U.S. presidential election. What ensued was over an hour of ludicrous conspiracy theories and virulently anti-communist falsehoods aimed at overturning the votes of Black, Brown and other working-class voters.

At the core of the news conference were allegations that Joe Biden’s recent election victory was a fraud perpetrated against the U.S. public. According to Trump’s legal team, the “deep state,” the media, George Soros, socialist countries and the Democratic Party all colluded to steal the election from Donald Trump through ballot machine manipulation. 

Far-right attorney Sidney Powell explained the allegations in depth. Powell claimed the Trump legal team had obtained mountains of evidence demonstrating the “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China” in the recent election. 

In her remarks, Powell traced the origin of this supposed fraud to Hugo Chávez, the socialist icon and former president of Venezuela — who has been dead for seven years!

Powell claimed that Chávez ordered the manipulation of Smartmatic voting machines to ensure that he never lost an election. Dominion Voting Systems, a Canadian-based company that provides voting machines to the U.S., is falsely claimed to be owned by the same company as Smartmatic. 

Accusations of fraudulent elections in Venezuela continue to be made by the U.S. government and right-wing oppositionists even in the face of widespread recognition of their efficiency and validity.

Powell’s conspiracy-laced statement also implicated Jewish billionaire George Soros in this vast plot to rig the election against Trump. Trump’s legal team argued that Soros put his full financial weight behind communist efforts to interfere with the U.S. elections. 

There is no evidence that Soros has relationships with or politically supports socialist countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela. On the contrary, he is a billionaire U.S. imperialist and devout capitalist. 

From the late 1980s up to today, Soros and his Open Society Foundation have poured millions of dollars into supporting pro-imperialist, right-wing “color revolutions” against socialism in former Soviet republics and other countries.

There is significant irony in the Trump team accusing China, Cuba and Venezuela of election tampering. If any country is guilty of election tampering, it is the United States. 

The efforts by U.S. administrations, under both Republicans and Democrats, to subvert democracy and empower right-wing regimes in countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, Honduras, Burkina Faso, Ukraine and many others, are well-documented. 

Outside of the bold-faced lies and baseless claims, the political lens of the news conference was gravely concerning in its unbridled anti-Semitism. Laying the blame upon the alleged collaboration of a Jewish billionaire and socialist countries smacks of the Nazi theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” 

This conspiracy theory was widely propagandized by the Third Reich to shift blame away from the capitalist class and towards Germany’s oppressed Jewish minority and the peoples of the Soviet Union. 

In the case of Trump’s legal team, the similarities of their allegations to the Nazi theory are hard to ignore. This is another step by Trump and his administration to muddy the waters and agitate their fascist base. 

While George Soros is no progressive hero, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that associate him with socialist countries are dangerous. They must be condemned and debunked broadly by the working-class movement.