Trump’s Conspiracy Theory Campaign

The Intercept

Donald Trump at the Israel American Council Summit 2024 on Sept. 19, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Angelina Katsanis/Politico

Donald Trump doesn’t try to campaign on any real issues. Instead, he traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy theories as he tries to get Americans to go down a rabbit hole into a dark alternate reality where immigrants kidnap and eat cats, the 2020 election was stolen, vaccines are poison, and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not really Black.

He has filled his third campaign for the presidency with a team that peddles conspiracy theorists, including Laura Loomer, JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Racism, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism are at the heart of many of Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories, but it is up to Trump’s most loyal MAGA cultists to sort out the political meaning of each new harebrained idea they are told to believe. Meanwhile, the nation’s political press corps lags far behind trying to fact-check Trump and his minions, like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.

Above all, Trump has built his campaign around conspiracy theories designed to stoke racist fears of immigrants and minorities, exploiting the hysteria that grips many white Americans over the demographic changes of the last few decades that have transformed the U.S. into a more diverse nation.

This is not new for Trump, who announced his 2016 campaign alleging Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists. But this time around, stoking and exploiting racist fears of immigrants is essentially all that he’s running on.

Trump has frequently said that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Considering his rhetoric, Trump’s campaign slogan might as well be “Blood and Soil.” That was the Nazi slogan calling for a racially pure Aryan German nation built around the pastoral ideal of rural life. It was also the original headline on a September 14 column in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie describing Vance’s willingness to spread false conspiracy claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating cats. Faced with complaints from Trump operatives and other right-wingers, the New York Times softened the headline to mush.

But “Blood and Soil” does capture what Trump and his legion of conspiracy theorists are doing. Trump and the MAGA cult have turned their backs on the cherished American tradition that the United States is unique because it is built on shared beliefs, rather than whether someone was born here or immigrated here.

Members of Trump’s legion of conspiracy theorists live in their own swamps of lies and disinformation.

Loomer, an extremely online far-right figure who until now was perhaps best known for spreading the lie that 9/11 was an inside job, has been traveling closely with Trump during the campaign. Kennedy, meanwhile, who ended his fringe presidential campaign and endorsed Trump in August, has a long history of spreading anti-vaccine misinformation and has branched out to add baseless conspiracy theories that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that anti-depressants cause school shootings, and that chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender.

What binds these conspiracy theories together is the way they are designed to damage the credibility of experts, scientists, and governments.

What binds these conspiracy theories together is the way they are designed to damage the credibility of experts, scientists, and governments. Well-informed and educated voters have fled Trump and MAGA, and he relies on so-called low information voters instead.

They are far more susceptible than other voters to Trump’s racist lies, and winning over these voters with conspiracy theories is a way for Trump to shore up his base.

While spreading the lie that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Trump and Vance have refused to denounce bomb threats and other threats of violence targeting the city as a result of their lies. The threats of violence have gotten so bad that the Ohio state police have had to step in and announce that it will help protect schools in Springfield, while Republican Gov. Mike DeWine personally debunked the rumors spread by Trump and Vance.

Vance’s role in spreading the vile falsehood about the immigrants eating pets has been particularly egregious — since he knows that he has continued to lie even after he and his staff were told that the stories weren’t true. He’s now added new lies that Haitian immigrants are causing an increase in communicable diseases in Springfield, which the director of the Ohio health department quickly said was false.

Of all of the members of Trump’s conspiracy legion, Vance is the most intriguing, because we can now watch, in real time, as he descends into a conspiracy theory-fueled alternative reality. Loomer and Kennedy have long since left reality behind, but Vance was as recently as 2016 lionized as a bestselling author and an important new literary voice and a Trump critic. Unlike many others who have slowly fallen into the madness of the alt-world, Vance seems to be making a very conscious choice to suddenly jump in, as if that was part of his bargain to become Trump’s running mate.

On CNN last weekend, Vance admitted as much.

When confronted with the fact that he is spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Vance has sold his soul. Just like every other Republican who has allowed the GOP to be captured by conspiracy theorists.

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