The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

McMaster had not been in the job long before the Bannon wing orchestrated attacks to undermine him with Trump. The campaign, using the full ecosystem of the alt-right media led by Bannon’s old team at Breitbart News, portrayed McMaster and others on his staff, such as the Russia expert Fiona Hill, as shadowy “globalists” with a subversive anti-Trump agenda, often invoking the anti-Semitic trope that they were pawns of the wealthy Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros.[16] In late May, the conspiracy website Infowars “unmasked” Hill as a “mole” from Soros who was, as she later summed it up, “in cahoots with General McMaster in a plot against the president.”[17] Hill believed the smear had come from Connie Mack, a Republican lobbyist for Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian leader of Hungary, who saw her as an obstacle to him meeting with Trump. On a radio show with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who headed Infowars, Roger Stone later bragged that the Infowars hit piece had been the first to identify Hill as “the globalist leftist Soros insider who had infiltrated McMaster’s staff,” with Jones adding that the evidence was “hand-delivered” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago that summer.[18]