Trump Proved How Gullible America Really Is
After he's gone, the US political system will remain terrifyingly vulnerable to grifters and conspiracy theorists.
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. Please subscribe if you haven’t done so. Photo of a QAnon supporter by Marc Nozell.
The most serious crisis American democracy has faced in 150 years began on March 23, 2011, when Donald Trump appeared on the View. The Apprentice star had been toying with a run for president against Barack Obama, and the hosts asked him about whether his divorces would be a problem for voters (he didn’t think so) and his policy ideas generally (he said South Korea should pay the US for keeping military bases there). Then the conversation turned to his “birther” views—Trump insinuated, citing nothing in particular, that Barack Obama may not have been born in the US. There was “something on that birth certificate that (Obama) doesn't like,” Trump said, claiming that Obama had hidden the document from public view. When Whoopi Goldberg called this accusation “dog mess” and said it was just because Obama was black, Trump denied it had anything to do with race. The argument got heated, the audience applauded both Trump and Whoopi, everyone began talking over each other, then the show had to go to a commercial break. When the hosts came back, they moved on to the celebrity contestants on Trump’s reality show. “Dionne Warwick gets beat up so badly,” the future US president said, back on comfortable ground.
Trump wasn’t the first person to accuse Obama of not being born in the US. Rumors to that effect had cropped up in 2008, and Obama’s presidential campaign rebutted them by releasing a birth certificate. Trump’s attack three years later may have been transparently false, but it made him by far the most famous birther. Less than two weeks after his View appearance, Trump became a regular on Fox & Friends, where he continued to say nutty things about Obama. Like on the View, the Fox News hosts didn’t shut Trump down or refuse to have him as a guest. Even worse, the Republican establishment didn’t condemn him; in early 2012, Mitt Romney celebrated getting Trump’s endorsement. As the journalist Joshua Green later wrote, birtherism was a key moment in Trump’s transformation into a legitimate political force: Once he saw that Republican elites wouldn’t deny pure conspiratorial nonsense, and Republican voters would eat it up, he knew he had a pathway to power.
Trump never stopped lying and spinning conspiracy theories. While he ran for president he intimated Ted Cruz’s father had something to do with the JFK assassination, when was he was president he said Democrats were inflating the death toll from Hurricane Maria to discredit him, and after he lost in 2020 he claimed—and still claims—the election was rigged. Along the way, he proved that it is possible to accumulate an incredible amount of power through misinformation. Our political system remains bizarrely vulnerable to baldfaced lies.
Americans will believe literally anything
Today, birtherism seems almost quaint. It’s been supplanted by QAnon, a baroque, fantastical conspiracy theory involving secret pedophile rings and Kennedy family members rising from the dead. Its adherents have fractured their families and broken up their marriages as they disappear down the rabbit hole, and some have been inspired to kidnap children and cause car crashes; the proto-Q “Pizzagate” theory drove a man to terrify pizza restaurant-goers with an assault rifle. Some conspiracists are putting themselves and others at risk by refusing to wear masks, and many may refuse to get a Covid vaccination when one becomes available.
Part of what has allowed these dangerous ideas to spread is social media and YouTube, whose algorithms can push people toward more extreme content, radicalizing them as they sit at their screens. Obama himself, in a recent Atlantic interview, called the digital spread of misinformation “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
But conspiracies are not caused solely by Facebook. We’ve always been a nation drawn to magical thinking. Polls have found that 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels and a substantial minority believes aliens have visited earth; a third of Americans think the government is hiding a cure for cancer. None of these ideas required social media in order to catch on. What has made the current crop of conspiracies so dangerous is not how they’re spread, but who supports them.
Trickle-down misinformation
Merely believing in a conspiracy isn’t necessarily a problem. If you imagine aliens and/or angels are watching your every move, that’s your right as an American—it might even make you a better person if you think the aliens and/or angels want you to help others and be polite. (This is basically how Santa Claus works.) There’s a guy out there who does extremely sexual paintings based on the alien abductions he believes he’s experienced. I hope we can all agree that that’s fine.
Conspiracy theories only turn toxic when they motivate you to do something harmful, i.e. the aliens demand a blood sacrifice. The clearest current example of this is the anti-vaccine movement, which has grown across international borders and political lines and has led to deadly outbreaks of diseases like measles, as conspiracy-addled parents refuse to vaccinate their children. These beliefs are fueled in part by a growing mistrust of the media, government, and other institutions, particularly among people who are marginalized in one way or another; those with lower education levels are more likely to believe that Covid was planned by the powerful, according to Pew.
But powerful people themselves have become infected with misinformation. Republican elites genuinely don’t seem to think Covid is a big deal or that masks help slow the pandemic, since they’ve held indoor gatherings that predictably turned into “superspreader” events. Conservative South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is still refusing to encourage mask use even as new cases and deaths pile up in her state. Conspiracy theories about the pandemic or the election have been voiced not just by Trump but by the CEO of private equity giant Blackstone and Elon Musk, along with too many right-wing politicians to name. Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert went on a rant on Newsmax that was so off the rails, it prompted this Reuters headline:
Belief in conspiracy theories, ironically, goes all the way to the top. And it trickles down. Trump’s allegations of the election being stolen have been repeated by irresponsible Trump-aligned media outlets and right-wingers like Gohmert, and people who trust conservative media naturally believe those allegations. On Tuesday in Wayne County, Michigan, Republican members of the board of canvassers this week refused to certify the election results, citing what they believed were irregularities with the count, particularly in Detroit. There wasn’t any merit to their objections, and the results were subsequently certified, but the episode shows how misinformation can lead public officials to do very irresponsible things.
The risks of inventing a new reality
In 2020, history repeated itself. A wealthy businesswoman with no political experience ran for Congress, funding most of her campaign out of her own pocket while espousing bizarre conspiracy theories, just as Trump did. Her fellow Republicans condemned her for the many racist and anti-Semitic things she said—they occasionally condemned Trump too—but didn’t do anything to stop her election. Some even seemed to look at her connection with the conservative base as an asset: Kelly Loeffler, the Georgia Republican senator facing a tough reelection, called her a “much-needed voice” when she celebrated getting her endorsement.
Trump 2.0 is Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter who was just elected to Congress. Though she has disavowed the more extreme aspects of the conspiracy theory, her ascension to political office hasn’t made her less inclined to spreading misinformation. She recently said that “masks are oppressive” and decried a coming “national shutdown” as a socialist power grab. But why would she suddenly become buttoned-down and rational? Spinning fantastical tales of evil cabals brought her fame and power, and if Trump’s example taught her anything, it’s that there’s no downside to living in your own version of reality—so long as you convince other people that it’s true.
Well, no personal downside anyway. Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories won him the presidency, but they were of no help when people started dying of Covid, no matter how many times he insisted that the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic. Similarly, being a climate denier does not stop you from being elected to Congress—it might even help, if you’re a Republican. But denialism will stop you from fighting climate change, a real thing that is actually happening. You can play make-believe for a long time on television or social media, but sooner or later reality comes crashing through.
This is the ultimate danger of conspiracies: Not that they spread widely, but that they capture the elites who make decisions that affect all of our lives. We got a taste of what a government run on conspiracies looks like under Trump. And we could see it again, if the QAnon caucus in Congress grows, or if some new outrageous, untrue idea takes hold of America. Whatever the next conspiracy turns out to be, news executives won’t censor it, social media won’t effectively block it, government officials won’t squash it. Trump has shown us a lot of things about our country, but above all he’s demonstrated that there’s no institution in America capable of killing a lie.
If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe and tell a friend! If you want to talk to me about this story or anything else, please email me.