President Donald Trump’s allies have frequently sought to undermine the case for impeachment by invoking the progressive investor and philanthropist George Soros. They have highlighted Soros’ involvement in Ukrainian affairs to explain away Trump’s abuse of power in that country and seized on any tie, no matter how faint, to present the investigation into the president’s misconduct as a conspiracy. At times their smears of Soros -- a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust -- have echoed vile, centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes.

Soros has been a bogeyman for the American right since 2004, when he began heavily funding Democratic presidential candidates and progressive movement organizations. Right-wing commentators have frequently sought to delegitimize progressive politicians, groups, and actions by seizing upon links between them and Soros (conservative media figures had regularly and falsely claimed for years that Soros funded Media Matters before he announced in 2010 that he would support the organization).

But abroad, Soros’ Open Society Foundations fund pro-democracy and anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and other countries in central and eastern Europe, supporting goals that traditionally align with bipartisan U.S. foreign policy in the post-Soviet era. There, his foes are authoritarian strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both of whom have responded to his efforts by deploying virulent anti-Semitism.

During Trump’s administration, those two threads of Soros criticism, from domestic Republicans and international autocrats, have merged. Trump has shown much more of an affinity for the corrupt authoritarians Soros opposes than he has for traditional democratic allies in Western Europe, and little concern about corruption when it does not directly impact his personal or political interests. And so his allies have begun attacking Soros’ agenda abroad in the same manner in which they’ve traditionally targeted his domestic one. Meanwhile, foreign governments have sought to secure the dismissals of troublesome U.S. diplomats by smearing them as anti-Trump based on their purported links to Soros.

That effort culminated earlier this year with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and conservative columnist John Solomon channeling the falsehoods of former Ukrainian prosecutors general Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko. Officials who lost their jobs following corruption scandals, they suggested that they had been the victims of a conspiracy masterminded by Soros and former Vice President Joe Biden.

The impeachment inquiry into Trump’s misconduct has given those attacks new urgency, with the president’s allies seeking to blame the entire situation on Soros and link him to as many figures involved in the scandal as possible in order to undermine their damning testimony. Consistent with past domestic and foreign criticism of Soros, those attacks sometimes bleed over into anti-Semitic smears.

Here are 10 ways they’ve brought Soros into the discussion.

Smear 1: Soros is the “puppet master” behind the whole Ukraine story.

Multiple conservative media figures have described Soros as the “puppet master” behind the Ukraine story, invoking a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of insidious Jewish forces secretly controling world events.

BlazeTV’s Glenn Beck discussed Soros’ links to Ukraine in a November 21 episode titled “The Puppet Master in Ukraine,” claiming that the Jewish philanthropist had been manipulating events for his personal profit and that the State Department had created a “giant cover-up” to hide his work “fomenting revolutions” in that country.