Can conspiracy theories keep Trump in power?
WASHINGTON— Down in the polls two weeks before the U.S. election, U.S. President Donald Trump is running flat-out, sometimes appearing at multiple rallies a day. It isn’t yet clear if this is his farewell tour, but he’s sure playing all of his greatest hits.
In Michigan on Saturday, he falsely claimed 50,000 ballots were found in a river as part of a plot to fix the election against him. In Florida on Friday, he said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is the head of a “crime family.” During a town hall last week, he refused to denounce the QAnon theory that the government is run by a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles. He also refused to apologize for spreading another conspiracy theory — that former president Barack Obama had faked the killing of Osama bin Laden and killed an elite Navy Seal team to cover it up. In Arizona on Monday, he criticized Attorney General Bill Barr for not arresting Biden. In Georgia on Friday, he chanted, “Lock up the Bidens, lock up Hillary.” In Michigan, he shouted, “Lock them all up.”
If this is the end, he’ll have gone out like he came in: trumpeting wild-eyed conspiracy theories and making imperious calls to imprison his political opponents.
Trump’s career as a politician essentially began when he became the face of the baseless and racist “birther” movement, which claimed Obama was not born in the United States, and was secretly a Muslim. In 2016, Trump’s victory was partly attributed to how he spun a cloud of vague criminal accusations out of an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email for government business — a minor administrative offence since committed by members of his own administration, including his daughter.
Neither theory had much substance, but both served their purpose for Trump: winning support from those wanting to believe things no credible politician would say, and casting enough of a cloud over Clinton to swing undecided voters in his favour.
As president, he’s kept at it. “Advisers say he continues to privately harbour a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact,” The New York Times reported in 2017. These included that the “Access Hollywood” tape he’d admitted was legitimate might have been faked, and that the 2016 election was rigged to cost him a popular vote victory.
More recently, he’s spread a baseless theory that mail-in voting is rigged against him in this election, and he’s repeatedly suggested Obama “spied” on his campaign — a vast conspiracy that led to his impeachment, as he tells it. (The Justice Department inspector general’s review of the Russia investigation has found it was justified, and found no evidence of spying.)
Which brings us back to the story he’s currently chanting, about Joe Biden, Biden’s son Hunter and Ukraine. Trump’s demand that the president of Ukraine provide dirt on the Bidens led to Trump’s impeachment on charges he’d used his office to further his personal political interests. Now, that dirt has finally emerged, brought forward dubiously by
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to the New York Post. Surely enough, it has become a latecampaign election cry for Trump.
Much of the story Giuliani brought to the Post is murky. It starts with a laptop computer allegedly brought to a repair shop by Hunter Biden, the contents of which were copied and turned over to Giuliani. Those contents allegedly included a so-called “smoking gun” email in which a Ukrainian businessman thanks Hunter Biden for an introduction to his father.
Among the story’s many suspect elements: The shop owner has been inconsistent in interviews; no one has been allowed to examine the emails for metadata that could help prove their provenance; the allegations appear consistent with a Russian disinformation campaign described by U.S. officials during Trump’s impeachment trial; U.S. intelligence had reportedly warned of an attempt by Russian spies to feed Giuliani false information; and the U.S. government has named one of Giuliani’s associates in digging up information about the Bidens as an “active Russian agent.”
Beyond that, the dots don’t connect to reveal anything of substance. It’s already known that Hunter Biden suffered addiction problems and traded on his father’s name for corporate directorships overseas (he’s called that “poor judgment”). What hasn’t been proven is that Joe Biden did anything wrong. The new “smoking gun” suggests a meeting was arranged, but Biden’s campaign says no record of such a meeting exists.
Further, the allegation pushed by Trump from the beginning is that Hunter Biden’s relationship to the company Burisma pushed Joe Biden to call for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to shield the company from investigation. But the entire U.S. government and much of the international community was calling for that corrupt prosecutor to be removed — Biden was mouthing official U.S. policy — and there was no investigation into Burisma being conducted. During the impeachment trial, it was established the firing made it more likely Burisma would be investigated, not less. A Republican congressional investigation of this released last month found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
Among the other new laptop revelations are private text conversations in which Hunter Biden laments his misjudgments and addiction problems, and his father offers caring and supportive words of encouragement. Strange material for controversy.
But Trump is no stranger to strange material. And his own history of conspiracy mongering shows there needn’t be any fire to justify blowing a lot of smoke while chanting for the arsonist to be locked up.
Trump has good reason to think that the more conspiracy theories circulate, the better. So from old and convoluted to new and absolutely bizarre, he appears happy to give them a stage — or, as the case may be in these final weeks of the campaign, a whole lot of stages. Just look at the rallies: If it makes people happy to chant that his opponents should be locked up, he’s happy to chant along.