Donald Trump the Conspiracy Theorist
Donald Trump has assaulted our senses with so much deplorable behavior over the past five years that it can be easy to forget that his first maiden foray into presidential politics involved being the loudest, angriest and most unjustifiably self-righteous voice of Birtherism, the movement to deprive Barack Obama of his status as the first black President of the United States by insisting that he was actually born in Africa, Kenya specifically, and lied and cheated his way into the White House.
This was one of many moments in the life of Donald Trump when he should have been deemed radioactive for being WAY too racist even for a racist country like the United States. The birther movement wasn’t veiled or subtle in its racism. On the contrary, it was pretty damn overt, a matter of angry, paranoid, distrustful white people terrified of losing their unexamined place of privilege and power in society accusingly casting an angry finger at someone smarter and more mature and disciplined than themselves ascending to the highest position in our society and insisting that since he has a foreign-sounding name he must be a foreign-born con man from Darkest Africa who deceived his way into the history books.
It’s not entirely clear why Trump felt so strongly about Obama’s birthplace, though Trump hilariously posited it largely as a matter of being a concerned citizen worried that others weren’t playing by the rules and scoring unfair advantages in the process. Of course, Trump’s whole deal is not playing by the rules but he’s never been shy about projecting his own faults and shortcomings onto others.
But we didn’t scorn Trump for backing a blatantly racist idea like Birtherism. We didn’t deem him too racist because it turned out that he was the EXACT level of racist needed to run for president as a Republican in 2016. Even more horrifyingly, it turns out that Trump was the right level of racist to win the Republican nomination and then the general election.
Trump isn’t someone who dabbles in conspiracy theories. He’s not someone who is intrigued by the idea that there are sinister puppet masters operating behind the scenes. No, Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist. That’s pretty central to who he is and how he sees the world. It’s a huge component of his political brand.
Donald Trump sees the world in terms of conspiracy theories. That’s his truth, the source of his beloved “alternative facts.” He angrily demanded that Barack Obama prove to the world that he was a natural-born citizen. Then he loudly proclaimed that the Mueller Investigation was nothing but a hoax perpetrated by his angry enemies to deny him his rightful place as the duly elected President of the United States, just as Trump has used his power, position and privilege to deny first Barack Obama and then Joe Biden their rightful place as duly elected Presidents of the United States.
Then Trump used his online bully pulpit to loudly insist that his old arch-nemesis Barack Obama had secretly been wire-tapping his phones and spying on him in what could only be deemed the greatest crime in the history of the universe, Obamagate. That is, until Trump, with his microscopic attention span and bottomless capacity for victimhood, declared the next unforgivable offense perpetrated against him by those meanies in the media and the Democratic Communist party the REAL greatest crime in the history of the universe.
Now of course Trump is using all of his time and energy and waning influence to relentlessly promote a series of preposterous, almost universally debunked conspiracy theories that separately and collectively paint, in his mind at least, an utterly damning and convincing portrait of electoral cheating on a scale almost beyond human imagination.
Trump’s Twitter account is both an official expression of the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world and the social media equivalent of the meme of Charlie Day from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with a crazed gleam in his eyes as he points furiously to information he thinks exposes a wide-ranging conspiracy but is actually just evidence of his growing insanity.
Trump no longer cares about being president. It’s all about the big conspiracy to deprive him of his second term, one he repeatedly insists he won in a landslide because if you’re going to lie, when not lie as boldly as possible?
Here’s the thing: Trump has repeated these lies so often and so shamelessly that there’s a good chance that he actually believes them at this point. He believes them because he desperately wants to believe that they’re true because otherwise he would be forced to face the brutal truth that Joe Biden, a man he considers boring and unworthy, officially defeated him for the most important job on the planet.
Trump feels so intensely that he won BY A LOT that he probably genuinely believes that to be true despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Trump may be a fake Christian, a fake patriot and a fake Conservative but he is a genuine, 100 percent, die-hard conspiracy theorist. Right now that’s pretty much all he is, which is unfortunate, as he is also, technically, the President of the United States, a job that he willing do seemingly anything to hold onto even though it seems to bore him to tears, unlike the conspiracy theories that make him feel truly alive.
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