Trump Lives in a Hall of Mirrors and He’s Got Plenty
of Company
It will
take a long time to drive conspiracy-mongering back to the fringes of American
politics.
By Peter Wehner
Contributing
Opinion Writer
- Nov. 2, 2020
If Donald Trump loses his re-election
bid, there will be a lot of ruin to sort through. But his most damaging and
enduring legacy may well turn out to be the promiscuous use of conspiracy
theories that have defined both the man and his presidency.
The president’s cruelest policies, like
intentionally separating children from their parents at the border, can at
least be ended, although their devastating effects will reverberate for
decades. It’s less clear what the half-life is for his conspiracy theorizing,
which fundamentally distorts the way people think about politics, our country
and reality itself.
There have been so many conspiracy
theories it’s easy to forget some of them, and this list is hardly exhaustive,
but it includes Mr. Trump claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United
States and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were behind the death of their former
aide Vince Foster; suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the
assassination of President John Kennedy and that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was
involved in the death of a staff member nearly 20 years ago; retweeting claims
that SEAL Team 6 didn’t kill Osama bin Laden in 2011; insisting that Ukraine
was hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and that Mr. Obama wiretapped Mr.
Trump’s phones; and promoting QAnon, a
far-right conspiracy theory that believes, as Kevin Roose put it in The Times, that “the world is run by a
cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while
operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.”
There was a time when
popularizing such crazed machinations would have caused one to be cast to the
outer fringes of American politics; in the case of Mr. Trump, it helped elect
him and has created a cultlike devotion among tens of millions of his
supporters. And because of Mr. Trump, conspiracy theorizing is now a central
feature of the Republican Party and American politics.
“We’ve never had a president who trades
in conspiracy theories, who prefers lies instead of fact,” the presidential
historian Douglas Brinkley told Peter
Nicholas of The Atlantic. The resulting blast radius is beyond anything we have
quite seen before.
Conspiratorial thinking is nothing new;
it has been around since the founding of the Republic. But what is new — where
Mr. Trump is a genuine innovator — is having a conspiracy-monger who is
president in a social media age. Whatever his other limitations, Mr. Trump is a
master at trafficking in conspiracy theories, implying that they are true
without always embracing them as true. He is calculated, purposeful and
malicious.
There is something particularly
dangerous about contemporary conspiracy theories. “What we’re seeing today is
something different: conspiracy without the theory,” Nancy L. Rosenblum and
Russell Muirhead, the authors of “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New
Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy,” told The Economist.
“Its proponents dispense with evidence and explanation. Their charges take the
form of bare assertion.”
“It is a powerful force, with the
capacity to animate popular fury, to delegitimize political opposition and to
hijack government institutions,” according to Dr. Rosenblum and Dr. Muirhead.
What we’re seeing, they said, is “sheer fabulation.” And in America, “this new
conspiracism now comes directly from the president, who employs his office to
impose his compromised sense of reality on the nation.”
This is injurious to
Trump supporters because people who believe conspiracy theories can become
consumed by them. It is not good for your brain (or your family life) when you
see patterns — secret plots by powerful, sinister figures — that don’t exist, in
order to give meaning to events.
And people rarely restrict themselves
to believing a single conspiracy theory; they usually come in clusters. Soon
enough, they become the prism through which budding conspiracists see the
world.
Of course, there is an allure to conspiracy
theories; they provide their followers with a sense of control, certainty and
the belief that they are holders of “privileged knowledge.”
At the same time, studies show that a belief in conspiracy theories
correlates to “impoverished interpersonal functioning,” meaning paranoia,
narcissism, disagreeableness, insecure attachments and Machiavellianism. Where
have we seen that before?
People who believe in conspiracy
theories are more likely to endorse violence as
a way to express disagreement with the government. Once they are deep in,
conspiracy theorists live in a distorted reality, a world of shadows, a hall of
mirrors.
But the damage hardly stops there.
Conspiracy theories, when they gain a wide enough currency, are destructive to
democracy. They cloud and eventually warp people’s thinking to the point that
even the most basic and obvious steps we need to take to slow the spread of a
lethal pandemic, like wearing a mask, are ridiculed.
Crowds at Mr. Trump’s rallies chant for the firing
of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, with a White House spokesman,
incredibly, dismissing Dr. Fauci “as exactly what the American people have come
to expect from the Swamp.”
The president has also accused doctors
around the country of inflating the number of Covid-19 cases, in unforgettable
terms: “Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from Covid. You know that,
right?” he told a rally in Michigan on
Friday. “I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say
‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid.’ ”
Conspiracists are
also unlikely to compromise with those they believe are involved in secret
plots to destroy them and the nation. Dialogue, debate and persuasion on these
terms are nearly impossible, nor are they desirable, since those who embrace
conspiracies live in a different epistemological universe from those who do
not. No amount of evidence can convince them they are wrong; indeed, the more
evidence that is amassed to refute their views, the more convinced they become
that the conspiracy theory is true.
Conspiracy theories also create
profound mistrust of institutions and our fellow citizens; their purpose is to
demolish faith in facts, data and science. And the propaganda spread by
conspiracy theorists encourages extremism and hatred of others,
especially anti-Semitism.
In the deepest sense, conspiracy
theories are an attack on reason, an assault on truth and a shared reality, on
what the political scientist Thomas Rid calls the
“liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in
essential custodians of factual authority.”
When conspiracy theories are promoted
with the velocity and on the scale that we are seeing today — when vanishingly
few Republican officials publicly stand against them — the effect is
vertiginous and disorienting. Peddling so much misinformation and
disinformation eventually overwhelms people and their critical faculties.
Americans are left demoralized, embittered, at each other’s throats.
This is what Donald Trump has done to
our country, with the full backing of his party. To align with Mr. Trump now,
in light of all we know, makes one complicit in the carnage, even if you’re
still a Republican. Especially if you’re still a Republican.
There is an ugly and dangerous symmetry
to Donald Trump’s political career. It was launched on the back of the racist
conspiracy theory that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the United States; during his
last town hall event, Mr. Trump elevated the claims of QAnon,
which the F.B.I. has labeled a domestic terrorist threat and
whose followers consider Mr. Trump to be a heroic figure.
It will take a long time to drive the
conspiracy-mongering back to the fringes of American politics, but it starts
with getting rid of the conspiracist in chief.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a
senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the previous
three Republican administrations, is a contributing opinion writer and the
author of “The Death of Politics:
How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”