Trump's attacks on his liberal nemesis are projections of his own guilt

In between President Donald Trump’sattempted firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and the successful termination of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vengeful and retributive Commander-in-Chief and his team of lawless fascists have had a busy and chaotic time, harming the collective interests and well-being of the American people.

The Trump administration placed more than 30 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees on paid leave, in addition to 140 the month before, all because of an open letter they signed criticizing leaders for taking the agency back to the pre-Hurricane Katrina era.

Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security barred states and volunteer groups who receive federal funds, such as the Salvation Army and Red Cross, from providing services to undocumented immigrants.

Disaster aid groups warned that new contracts for awards and grants “would make it harder for nonprofits to help the most vulnerable Americans in the aftermath of a disaster.” No matter.

Last Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump would cancel $4.9 billion in international aid already approved by Congress, under a little-tested theory called the “pocket recission,” without approval from lawmakers.

Trump is trying to wrest spending power from Congress, which enhances the likelihood that unless Democratic senators chicken out, there will be a government shutdown this month.

The OMB also said Trump was using his authority under the Impoundment Control Act to cancel billions of dollars “in woke and weaponized foreign aid money that violates the President’s America First priorities.”

Amid all this, I want to turn our attention to the lawless president’s repetitive use of the rule of law as a tool of intimidation against actual and fantasized enemies. I do so to capture one of Trump’s favored forms of victimizing others, as part of his modus operandi: retribution and normative abuse of power.

I use one of Trump’s long-time fantasized targets for slander to illustrate what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the “up is down and down is up” reality of Big Brother totalitarianism. I’m referring to one of the world’s foremost philanthropists, now the subject of Trump’s fake threats to bring “serious charges against billionaire liberal donor George Soros and his ‘wonderful Radical Left son,” accusing them of wrongdoing without evidence.

I do so because of our need to appreciate, if not understand, Trump’s psychic need to defend himself from his life course of lawlessness and associated harms, such as those he is currently causing millions to suffer, both domestically and globally.

It is this mental condition from which Trump suffers that calls out for a therapeutic intervention — like using the 25th amendment to stop him conducting political-legal affairs in the way in which the “pot calls the kettle black.” That is to say, by psychologically projecting onto others that which he has already done or will do, with or without the help from his loyal Gestapo-like fascists.

‘Outrageous’ threats

Soros has been a long-time financial supporter of Democrats and liberal causes. He has been a vocal critic of Trump, saying during his first administration that the president “would like to establish a mafia state.”

Last Wednesday, 27 Aug., in a social media post, Trump contended that Soros and his son Alexander “should both be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.”

Remember, before returning to office this year, Trump and 18 co-conspirators – of whom three pled guilty — were indicted for RICO violations, for participating in efforts to steal the 2020 election from Joe Biden, culminating in the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.

Like most of Trump’s lies, he was making up things to intimidate others who have a whole lot less money and power than Soros or his son.

Trump continued: “We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America anymore, never giving it so much as a chance to ‘BREATHE,’ and be FREE. Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!”

In his rambling and usually disconnected way Trump added, “That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends. Be careful, we’re watching you! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Soros is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. He and his offspring would never back down or capitulate to Trump’s autocratic desires or schemes.

In response, the Open Society Foundations, the nonprofit funded by the Soros family, posted: “Threats against our founder and chair are outrageous. Our mission [has always been about advancing] human rights, justice, and democratic principles in the United States and around the world.”

Who is George Soros?

This alleged “radical,” a frequent target of far-right ire, who Trump has for years publicly defamed, was born in Budapest to a non-observant Jewish family in 1930. Surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in 1947 he moved to England, where he received BSc and Master of Science degrees in philosophy from the London School of Economics.

An investor, hedge fund manager, author, and philanthropist, Soros is best known for founding Soros Fund management, the Open Society Foundations, and the Central European University, and in the late 1980s and early 90s influencing the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

In the world of banking and finance, Soros formulated the general theory of reflexivity for capital markets, providing insights into asset bubbles and the market values of securities, as well as value discrepancies used for shorting and swapping stocks. Not surprisingly, he did quite well (or badly, depending on one’s financial standpoint), netting himself $1 billion as a result of his short sale of $10 billion of pounds sterling during the 1992 Black Wednesday currency crisis .

In 2025, Soros’s net worth is $7.5 billion, according to Forbes, even after giving away more than $32 billion to charitable causes, according to the International Business Times.

In the first quarter of the 21st century, no other individual has invested as much in criminal justice research, reform, and policy change. Key initiatives include:

• In 2014, the New York Times reported a combined investment of roughly $175 million in criminal justice and drug policy changes since 2004, plus another $62.5 million for marijuana legalization.
• In 2020, the Open Society Foundations pledged $220 million for racial justice, including funding for criminal justice reform and civic engagement opportunities.
• Soros has contributed to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors, such as $1.7 million provided for Larry Krasner's first campaign for Philadelphia district attorney.
• The Foundations have supported initiatives like the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, investing nearly $20 million in programs aimed at improving life outcomes for Black men and boys.

Who is Donald Trump?

According to Bloomberg, in 2017, when he first became president, Trump’s net worth was $2.3 billion: less than he received and/or inherited from his father, Fred, Sr., between 1949 and 1999. In a lifetime as a real-estate entrepreneur and businessman, Trump lost more than he made.

However, notwithstanding numerous emolument violations, including refusing to place the Trump Organization into a blind trust, by his return to power in 2025 he had more than doubled his net worth to $5.1 billion, primarily by way of investments in crypto currency and his Truth Social media company.

Unlike Soros’s founding of the well-respected, not-for-profit Central European University, which after 34 years is thriving in Austria, with students from more than 100 countries, Trump operated from 2005 to 2010 his for-profit, fraudulent Trump University. After the 2016 election, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to defrauded students who had paid up to $35,000 to enroll in sham programs.

Trump also founded the philanthropic Trump Foundation — which was forced to shut down in 2018, after public exposure of its“egregious pattern of illegality.’” Trump had topay $2 million over misuse of funds. The foundation’s remaining $1.5 million was distributed to charitable organizations.

As previously mentioned, via initiatives such as the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Soros has championed philanthropic giving to improve the lot of some of the most disadvantaged sectors of U.S. society, and thereby tackle some causes of crime.

In office, supposedly responsible for the administration of criminal justice, and criminal policy reform, Trump has claimed to defend “law and order,” while becoming the greatest de-funder of law enforcement in U.S. history.

For example, in April the Trump administration terminated 373 multi-year grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, amounting to about $500 million and affecting 221 organizations in red and blue states and urban, suburban, and rural areas alike.

Sixty percent of these cuts had nothing to do with programs to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the cited reason for such harsh action. Forty percent of the cuts had to do withreducing civil rights abuses by law enforcement: ending federal oversight of local policing, cancelling consent decrees meant to curb police violence against Black people in more than 20 cities.

These terminated grants represent a terrible setback in crime prevention, as they provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution; victims’ services; juvenile justice and child protection; substance use and mental health treatment; corrections and reentry; justice system enhancements; research and evaluation; and other state and local public safety functions.

Lose-lose

As Trump’s autocratic and anti-democratic coup pushes dangerously forward, the agent of chaos and destruction himself continues to be driven in part by his antisocial personality disorders and desire for power, in part by a fetishized indifference to data, facts, rights, ethics, and injustices.

This Trumpian dystopia is already having dreadfully adverse and debilitating impacts. These include but are not limited to the national debt, domestic and international politics, micro- and macroeconomics, ecological and environmental sustainability, education and research, health care and human services, and market regulation and social control.

The result is clearly a lose-lose situation for everyone in the United States except for the malignant narcissist-in-chief, his sordid billionaire buddies, and those AI technocrats whose momentary bubble is likely to burst by 2029 — as the mortgage bubble did in 2008 and the dot.com bubble did before that.

As even Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed, that is just the way financial capital works. George Soros is one billionaire who has sought, in some way, to mitigate the damage such disasters wreak. If this comparison between Soros and his would-be persecutor tells us anything, it is that Donald Trump is perfectly willing to make things worse for most everyone else, so long as it makes him richer.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, includingCriminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel,Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections