Image by Twitter

By Dave Goldiner September 20, 2018

Donald Trump’s handpicked warm-up speaker for his Las Vegas rally is a loud-and-proud conspiracy theorist who called the mass shooting at a country music festival a “Muslim terror plot” and suggested that George Soros paid Charlottesville demonstrators to make the far right look bad.

Wayne Allyn Root, will address a campaign-style rally with Trump in Sin City Thursday, also pushed the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich as a “HUGE issue” — and spouted bizarro theories that Democratic bigwigs ordered his killing, the Daily Besst reported.

Trump is apparently playing to the farthest right crowd as he mounts a political trip to ostensibly boost Sen. Dean Heller, a Republican senator who is struggling to survive as the only GOP incumbent in a state that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.

Root claimed on Twitter that Trump personally intervened to get him the coveted spot before the president at the rally. A radio host and author, Root may have ingratiated himself with Trump with his book: Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America.

Root famously blamed the mass killing on ISIS even though it turned out to have been committed by a homegrown white male killer.

He also said he suspects George Soros of paying off actors to impersonate white nationalists at the Charlottesville rally last year. Far right wing figures and anti-Semites often use Soros as a dog whistle signifying a Jewish dominated global conspiracy.

He recently launched an unhinged rant on radio blaming various Democratic figures for the 2016 murder of Rich, which he and other far right wing commentators believe was carried out to silence Rich or punish him for supposedly leaking Democratic National Committee secrets to Russia.

“He was murdered because he was the guy that gave all the DNC files to Julian Assange and Wikileaks,” Root asserted on his radio show, even accusing disgraced ex-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a possible culprit. “It sure seems to me to point to leading Democrats—Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC, the Clintons, Hillary Clinton, all the above, Donna Brazile—all the above seem to be mixed up in this, they all had a motive to kill this guy.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$36 $500

$120 $180 Other amount