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Trump’s calls for protests condemn George Soros, echo Jan. 6 — and draw Jewish concern
WASHINGTON (JTA) — “They’re coming for me,” Donald Trump said in a fundraising email to his supporters, and he immediately made clear who “they” were: “district attorneys hand-picked and personally funded by George Soros.”
The email, sent late Monday, came a day ahead of when, Trump claims, he is likely to be arrested. He says he will be charged for allegedly paying off a paramour to keep quiet about their sexual encounter, and has sent a flurry of appeals calling for protests.
And those appeals have also named a villain: Soros, the Jewish billionaire and progressive megadonor who is at the center of myriad antisemitic conspiracy theories.
In a post in nearly all-caps on his website, Truth Social, on Saturday, Trump railed against the “CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS.”
In that post, Trump also returned to another motif of his with an ominous history. He ended by telling supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
To some, that statement recalled Trump’s tweets more than two years ago, when he urged protesters to come to a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Jewish groups who track antisemitism and Jewish security say they are keeping an eye on Trump’s latest calls for protests, but note that so far those posts have not attracted the groundswell of support that followed his past appeals. Trump’s 2021 post touted a rally that culminated in violence — the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said organized extremists, who have heeded Trump’s calls in the past, are displaying wariness online this time, fearful of being drawn into a trap. A number of them are preoccupied with the aftermath of Jan. 6, as some of their members are being prosecuted for their roles in the riot.
Other groups, Segal said, are preoccupied with this year’s culture wars. “Proud Boys are busy protesting drag queen story hours,” he said, referring to one of the groups implicated in a number of violent protests.
Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community network, the consultancy to the national Jewish community, likewise said his group was not seeing any imminent plans for violence. “We are not seeing anything specific to the Jewish community with respect to recent calls or amplification of calls for protests,” Masters said in a text message.
Nonetheless, Trump’s constant invocation of Soros raises concerns, Segal said, especially given reports of substantive spikes in antisemitic attacks.
“The danger of referencing Soros in a call for protests like this, is that you never know what bad actors are interpreting that as,” Segal said. “It’s not unreasonable for the Jewish community, who feels particularly vulnerable, to hear that in a way that is uncomfortable as well.”
Soros, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and financier, has been at the center of countless conspiracy theories for decades, and was the target of a 2018 bomb scare carried out by a pro-Trump antisemitic attacker. He featured prominently in the conspiracy theories embraced by the gunman who massacred 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
Bragg is among a number of liberal prosecutors backed in recent election cycles by Color of Change, a political action committee that Soros has funded. He was the largest donor to the group in the most recent election cycle, giving it $1 million out of the $4 million it raised.
It’s not at all clear that Bragg is ready to bring charges, or what charges he would bring against Trump. Speculation about a pending arrest has come only from Trump, and after he predicted the arrest over the weekend, one of his spokesmen quickly walked it back, saying that the Trump camp had no new information.
Trump is lashing out as multiple investigations into him appear to be intensifying, including by state officials in Georgia into election interference and by federal authorities into the role he played in spurring the Jan. 6 violence by rioters who believed his falsehoods about the 2020 election and into his alleged mishandling of highly classified documents.
He also is under pressure from a Republican Party that includes members endeavoring to distance themselves from his myriad scandals, even as he seeks the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
One possible crime Bragg might be investigating is whether Trump falsified records to cover up his payment to Daniels, which was made through his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Trump’s mentions of Alvin Bragg — the Manhattan district attorney investigating his preelection payoff to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress — seem to constantly come with invocations of Soros. In a post late Monday on Truth Social, he suggested he did not believe the NYPD would take orders from Bragg, should he ask them “TO PUT THEIR GREATEST CHAMPION & FRIEND IN PRISON FOR A CRIME THAT DOESN’T EXIST … ALL THE WHILE THE SOROS ALLOWS MURDERERS AND OTHER VIOLENT CRIMINALS TO FREELY ROAM THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK?”
Trump is hardly the only Republican invoking Soros. Trump’s likely rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also mentioned Soros and Bragg in remarks on Monday, while getting a dig in at Trump.
“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, I just, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said. “But I do know this, the Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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