As the US election hots up, Donald Trump is rehashing old conspiracy theories and inventing new ones to fire up his base and fill his coffers. The crazier the better.
In this week’s most dramatic US election news, Trump and his supporters claimed that the Biden regime had planned to assassinate him during an FBI search for classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Of course it was nonsense. Another ludicrous claim, easy to disprove – but hard to remove from the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists plugged into the bowels of the internet.
The wild claims were sparked when the judge in Trump’s classified documents case this week unsealed a court paper prepared by Trump’s lawyers that contained a wilfully misleading quotation from an FBI policy statement suggesting agents were planning to use deadly force in August 2022 when they executed a search warrant to recover missing documents.
The former president stirred up the hysteria with a post on his Truth Social site: “Biden’s DOJ authorised use of deadly force against President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago raid.”
The actual FBI text read: “Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”
This is bog-standard procedural stuff for all FBI raids. Even Fox News noted that the same “standard” use of force policy was in place when FBI agents visited the home of President Joe Biden.
Others pointed out that agents knew Trump would not be present when the search was carried out.
But by then, reports of the “assassination plan” and of “FBI brown shirts” were raging on right-wing news channels.
One of Trump’s most powerful and unhinged supporters, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, declared: “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
Trump ran with it in a subsequent campaign email that screamed: “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger. He thinks he can frighten me, intimidate me, and KNOCK ME DOWN!
“But worst of all? They think their THUG TACTICS will cause proud supporters like YOU to abandon me.
“But here’s the one thing they don’t know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”
The pivotal floating voters that Trump and Biden need for victory in November won’t buy into this nonsense. But it’s probably not aimed at them. More receptive will be the Maga mugs and far-right who will put their hands in their pockets to help Trump’s campaign coffers – which are running low thanks to his spiralling legal bills.
Todd Belt, a political scientist at George Washington University, said assassination conspiracy was straight from the Trump playbook. “In the past, Trump has saved his most outrageous comments for instances when he wants to distract people from something else. He knows that it works, and the more outrageous the claim, the greater the pivot in attention,” he said.
“My suspicion is that the assassination claim is a diversion from the “Reich” advertisement. Even Trump knows that was a problem.”
Speaking on CNN, Trump’s ex-White House communications director turned critic Anthony Scaramucci also thought the “assassination” theory might have helped “take a little bit of the heat off” Trump over the unified Reich row. But Scaramucci also thinks the row was designed to enrage hardcore Trump supporters – and gain access to their wallets.
“He needs money right now, so he’s flying around the country, he’s landing in places like Texas and he galvanises his base and they open up their cheque books and they start writing cheques because he was behind on the money,” Scaramucci said. “That’s why he’s pressing trigger buttons right now, that ‘the president was trying to assassinate me even though I wasn’t in Mar-a-Lago’.”
A new study of Trump’s social media activity suggests he is ramping up his promotion of conspiracy theories ahead of the November poll.
Trump has posted links to QAnon-promoting accounts more than 800 times during his first two years of actively posting on his new social media platform Truth Social, according to the survey by the Media Matters, a liberal media monitoring site.
This is a huge increase in conspiracy promotion by Trump since his Twitter account was suspended on 8 January 2021 for his promotion of lies about the general election result.
From 2017 until that point, Trump amplified QAnon-promoting accounts on that platform around 300 times.
Analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump posts on the platform “29 times a day on average, far more than he tweeted during his first campaign and most of his presidency”, that he is “more likely to write in all caps”, and that his posts frequently “contained insulting language directed at someone.”
The report notes that in the right-wing bubble of his Truth Social site, freed from even the limited constraint of Twitter, he is serving up “an even more extreme version of his online self” that provides disturbing insight into what a second Trump term could look like, “isolated, vitriolic and vengeful”.
Trump’s conspiracies
The QAnon conspiracy began as a set of anonymous posts on fringe online message boards. A user or users, identifying themselves as a mysterious whistleblower called Q, claimed to work inside the Trump administration. The posts alleged the world was controlled by a vast conspiracy of Democrats – who also worshipped Satan and abused children – and that Trump was part of a secret plan to vanquish them. Mass arrests, known by followers as “The Storm”, were coming at any moment.
For five years, Trump promoted “the birther conspiracy” suggesting that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. Following a successful Conservative Political Action Conference appearance where he said he was considering a run for the presidency, Trump began appearing on talk shows urging President Obama to release his birth certificate and questioning if he was born in the United States. On “Fox & Friends”, Trump insisted Obama spent “millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue,” and floated the idea on Bill O’Reilly’s show that the certificate could say the president is a Muslim.
In January this year, as his then Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley surged in New Hampshire polling, Trump revived the racist “birther” technique by posting an article on his Truth Social account from a right-wing outlet that claimed Haley, his GOP rival, is ineligible to be president because her parents were not US citizens when she was born. Haley was born in South Carolina and has lived in the US her entire life. Her parents were immigrants, who became citizens after her birth in 1972. Despite this, Haley has now endorsed Trump for president.
Source: Trump is fuelling conspiracists with ‘assassination’ claims – and making money
