On its Official Website, the Republican Party Calls Joe Biden a "Puppet" of Bernie Sanders

On July 16, 2020, a blog post on the official website for the Republican Party ran with the headline: “Joe Biden: A Puppet of Bernie and the radical left.” 

The short post outlines Biden’s platform on energy, immigration, and taxes, describing it as among “the most radical in modern history.” The post closes by warning ominously “While Joe Biden might be the physical nominee for the Democrat Party, the agenda of Bernie Sanders and AOC is Biden’s platform.”

By casting Senator Bernie Sanders, the most famous Jewish politician in the United States, as a puppet-master, the Republican Party promoted an antisemitic trope: The "puppet-master” characterization has been used to present Jews as shadowy manipulators, secretly orchestrating world events on the political or financial main stage. Jewish philanthropist George Soros has long been depicted by right-wing pundits and politicians as a literal puppet-master controlling Democrats, social movements, and global incidents. This is one of the very conspiracies invoked by the Tree of Life shooter before he committed the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. As the 2018 Tree of Life shooting made all too painfully clear, the puppet-master trope can have material and even deadly consequences.

This blog post is one of the most blatant promotions from the official Republican Party — not merely an elected official who is part of the GOP, but the party itself — of antisemitism to date.