The Swirling Miasma of Trump’s Conspiracy Theories
He wheezes them out himself, and surrounds himself with people who fill the air with vast, noxious clouds of paranoia and lies.
DONALD TRUMP IS AN INVETERATE LIAR. But his lies come in different shapes and flavors and serve different purposes. Perhaps the most pernicious of the bunch are the conspiracy theories put forward for the objective of manipulating the public. At compiling and spreading such theories the former president is an old and experienced hand, one even might say a master.
Trump, after all, began to make a name for himself in national politics as an early progenitor of the birther myth: the contention—racist at its core—that Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as president because he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States. Over the last four years Trump has invested heavily in an even more damaging conspiracy theory: the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Among the bad things that flowed from this Big Lie was the violence of the January 6th insurrection and the fact that a significant fraction of the country still today does not accept Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president of the United States. In Trump’s current campaign for the White House he claims that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and insane asylums to flood the United States with violent migrants. The complete absence of evidence for this has not stopped him from repeating it at every turn.
Even yesterday, during an early-morning rampage on Truth Social, Trump repeatedly re-posted messages from accounts that promote QAnon conspiracy gobbledygook. As Alex Kaplan from Media Matters noted, several of the messages and memes that Trump re-posted used QAnon catchphrases.
Trump loves to blast the media for putting out what he calls “fake news.” But over the last decade he has actually been the single largest and most effective purveyor of fake news in the country. Wikipedia even has an entry listing “conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump,” which includes nearly fifty separate items, as well as a list of conspiracy theorists Trump has promoted. Dismayingly long though they are, the lists are far from exhaustive.
And anyone who may have hoped against hope that Trump’s conspiracy-mindedness might mellow with the passage of time, the coming of old age, the perils of various legal entanglements, or the pressures of electoral politics should by now have been disabused of the notion. Trump’s own sense of the workings of the world seems to depend on his belief in conspiracy theories. For many of his supporters, conspiracy theories are a major part of what they hear about on TV and talk radio, what they read and talk about on social media, and how they bond with one another. And Trump continues to surround himself with associates who revel in spreading conspiracy theories. In some cases, that’s their very business model.
THE LEADING AND MOST VICIOUS conspiracy theorist of the era is Alex Jones, the proprietor of Infowars, who, among other accomplishments, spread the theory that the Sandy Hook massacre in which twenty children and six adults were killed was actually staged by “crisis actors” with the objective of bringing about a highly restrictive gun control regime. Trump has echoed some of Jones’s preposterous claims and even appeared on his show, where he praised Jones’s “amazing reputation.”
Trump admirer Elon Musk has over the last two years remade his social media site into a haven for numerous conspiracy theorists who had previously been banned from it, and he uses X as his own huge megaphone with which to promote outlandish ideas. Thus, he has put up posts promoting the Pizzagate hoax, the long-debunked sicko lie that the Democratic party is connected to a pedophilia ring that uses restaurants—including a pizza joint in Washington, D.C.—as its cover. Musk has also peddled the myth, verging into antisemitism—the most enduring of all conspiracy theories—that the Jewish financier George Soros is at the root of evil in the modern world: “He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity,” Musk tweeted last year.
Trump has now drawn close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whom conspiracy theories are his stock in trade. He is most famous for spreading the falsehood that vaccines cause autism in children. But that is just the beginning of an impressive list. NPR summed it up last year:
Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain,” Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan [in June 2023]. Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS may not be caused by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.
But NPR was by no means comprehensive. There was also RFK Jr.’s 2023 claim that the COVID-19 virus was bioengineered to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people”—a touch of antisemitism once again. And just this Monday—which is to say, days after Trump invited RFK to serve on his presidential transition team—he tweeted out his support for the conspiracy theory that airplane condensation trails in the sky are really “chemtrails” poisoning the population. “We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy said.
If Trump wins a second term in the White House, in exchange for his endorsement this crank may be awarded a high-ranking government position, possibly cabinet level, in the management of American healthcare.
TRUMP’S CLOSE ADVISER and speechwriter Stephen Miller is best known for foaming at the mouth in opposition to immigration, legal and illegal. But he has another side. Consider his remarks last month at a conclave of the National Conservatives. He spoke there about what he called “probably the biggest hoax in all of American history,” to wit, the “Biden cognition hoax.”
This supposed hoax is actually a conspiracy theory par excellence.
In recent weeks, said Miller, we have learned that the president of the United States “was cognitively impaired to the point where he wasn’t even attempting to run the country on a day-to-day basis.” In fact, he was “cognitively impaired to the point of being nonfunctioning brain dead.”
Keeping this fact hidden was the work of a large number of conspirators. Miller names Biden’s former chief of staff, Ron Klain, Michelle and Barack Obama, Susan Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the heads of all eighteen U.S. intelligence agencies. These individuals both perpetrated the hoax and covered it up, and “allowed the country to be run by secret unnamed Democrat party interests for three and a half years.”
How did they keep this astonishing hoax going? According to Miller, it is a “credible inference” that prior to those occasions when the president had to appear in public, his aides “would pump [him] full of drugs to the point where he could perform for 45 to 60 minutes.” Unfortunately for these perpetrators, a major blunder occurred when they gave Biden his drug “cocktail” before his televised June 27 debate with Donald Trump. The medications failed to work and Biden’s “true vegetative state was revealed.”
Utter rubbish. But evidently believable to some audiences, including those at the National Conservatism gathering who greeted Miller’s remarks with hearty applause. Yoram Hazony, the chief impresario of the National Conservative meetings, should be ashamed to feature such rot, but evidently—it’s a credible inference—he’s fully on board with it.
CONSPIRATORIAL THINKING has waxed and waned over the past two and a half centuries of American history, as described by Richard Hofstader in his 1964 Harper’s article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Jesse Walker in his 2013 book The United States of Paranoia. Sometimes it is confined to the fringes, but it often bursts out into the wider consciousness. The rise of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s was perhaps the closest the conspiratorial mode of thought and expression ever came to the center of national power.
Until Donald Trump came along. By capturing the White House in 2016, he punctured a ceiling and the conspiratorial mode became the new normal for one of our two major political parties. The GOP is today led by purveyors of falsehoods that millions of Americans have been primed to believe constitute truth.
This is a deeply unhealthy condition for the country, creating an epistemically polarized electorate and degrading the discourse that is the lifeblood of honest democratic deliberation. If Trump is defeated at the ballot box this November it will no doubt spawn an entirely new wave of conspiracy theories to explain that result—another set of Big Lies. But by the same token, defeating Trump in November is the first and most important step in bringing about a cure for what has become a dangerous national epidemic.
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