David Corn: Donald Trump's Reign Is Ending as It Began: With a Conspiracy Theory

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4 hours ago
Donald Trump’s Reign Is Ending as It Began: With a Conspiracy Theory
From his racist birtherism to his phony claim of a rigged election.
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow



Donald Trump is leaving the presidency the way he began his political career: as an unhinged peddler of conspiracy theories.

Trump laid the foundation for his 2016 campaign for president by becoming the right’s No. 1 Barack Obama hater. And he did that by championing the racist birther conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that the first Black president had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii. The point of slinging this swill was to suggest that Obama was an illegitimate commander in chief. (Under the Constitution, only a “natural born” American citizen is eligible to be president.) That was, of course, total bunk. Yet Trump kept pushing this accusation, claiming he had investigators who were getting the goods on Obama.

It was a lie. A big lie. Trump had nothing. His investigators had nothing—if they even existed. Yet the truth didn’t matter. Not to many Republicans. Trump was mounting a disinformation operation to win over the get-Obama crowd in preparation for a potential presidential bid. And it worked. As the loudmouth questioning Obama’s legitimacy, Trump, who had never run for any office, quickly developed a conservative constituency that he then mobilized during the Republican primary contest. Being a conspiracy theorist didn’t disqualify Trump within the Fox-driven GOP cosmos. It boosted his prospects and helped him become president. Dishonesty paid off.

Through his presidency, Trump repeatedly sought to protect himself by encouraging paranoia and disseminating baseless tales of conspiracy. To escape the taint on his 2016 electoral victory caused by the Russian attack and his efforts that aided Vladimir Putin’s assault on American democracy, Trump promoted various false counter-narratives: the Obama administration and the Deep State had spied on and schemed against him; Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 contest to thwart him; and the Russian attack on the Democratic Party was a hoax. The dissemination of these fake stories also worked, in a way. They muddied up what should have been a clear picture: Trump had betrayed the nation by abetting the Russian attack, which he sought to exploit. But Trump was able to generate enough baloney to deflect attention from the core issue and to turn the Trump-Russia scandal into a debate between fact and disinformation. Once more, spreading conspiracy theories helped Trump.

To keep his hold on the presidency, Trump again turned to this tactic. He and his henchmen cooked up false stories about Joe Biden and the business dealings of his son Hunter. And Trump muscled the president of Ukraine to support the fraud. These actions did lead to Trump’s impeachment. But Trump, thanks to his GOP enablers, survived the Senate trial. He was not penalized. And perhaps the anti-Biden propaganda Trump and his crew concocted did help gin up Trump’s base or turn off some potential Biden voters.

Now, as Trump faces the biggest loss in his public life, he is whipping out the same game plan: issue outlandish charges that focus on underhanded plots. With Biden the apparent winner in a decisive electoral and popular vote count, Trump is refusing to acknowledge reality and spinning dark allegations of a massive plot against him. The counting was rigged. The election software was rigged. Like a drowning man, he grabs on to whatever false accusation he can as a lifeline. Last week, Trump embraced an unfounded conspiracy theory that claimed a software company had switched millions of Trump votes to Biden votes. As Mother Jones reported, this claim had originated with an anonymous internet poster who had previously accused Biden of being a sex criminal and of being bad for white people. This particular conspiracy theory jumped from this poster to a rightwing blogger and then was picked up by OAN, the to-the-right-of-Fox network. There was no confirmation of the details. And after OAN reported on this “analysis,” Trump tweeted it out, citing OAN. A conspiracy theory with no basis had hit the right-wing disinformation transmission belt and ended up being blessed and exploited by the president of the United States.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/donald-trumps-reign-is-ending-as-it-began-with-a-conspiracy-theory/

[Cha]

1. And, all points in between.