The Cult of Trump Makes the Worst Conspiracy Theories Mainstream
In most ways, Donald Trump's campaign rally in Tampa on Tuesday was no different than any of the other rollicking stadium shows he's been putting on for the past three years. He paid tribute to struggling farmers, and repeated his vow to build the wall, and reveled once again in his defeat of his archenemy, Hillary Clinton. Even when he arrived at the point in the script when he says something that should have baffled everyone in the building not related by blood to Lucille Bluth—"You know, if you go out and want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card. You need ID!"—the crowd cheered lustily, just as they always do.
The spectacle's most jarring visuals instead came courtesy of the people who traveled to hear him speak: People who positioned themselves in the foreground of the camera shot and paraded about on the arena floor, holding aloft signs that proudly proclaimed their affiliation with some of the weirdest, darkest, and most disgusting corners of the Internet.
Seth Rich, if you'll recall, was a 27-year-old DNC staffer murdered two years ago in D.C. in what police believe was a botched robbery attempt. Because of the identity of his employer, however, conspiracy theorists began wondering if he played a role in transferring the e-mails allegedly "stolen" by WikiLeaks and published during the 2016 campaign—and if Hillary Clinton had ordered him killed to ensure his silence. Although this absurdity has now been debunked more times than it has been asserted, outlets like Fox News worked to fuel the vile exploitation of Rich's tragic death, laundering the story until it was just respectable-sounding enough to end up in the mouths of honest-to-God members of Congress.
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Trump Must Go
QAnon is, somehow, even more difficult to explain than the Seth Rich conspiracy theories—a sprawling, convoluted mad libs of a worldview in which the Mueller investigation of Trump is actually elaborate cover for the real Mueller investigation, which aims to once and for all take down the child sex ring run by, among many others, John Podesta, George Soros, and Hillary Clinton herself. (It takes its name from an anonymous 4chan member who claims to know all this, thanks to his top-secret "Q" clearance, and whose progressively nonsensical message-board postings are scrutinized, dissected, and reconstituted until they yield more evidence of Huma Abedin's links to the occult.) QAnon combines the diligence of Zapruder-film truthers, the imaginative power of Louise Mensch's Twitter feed, and the subject matter of Pizzagate. Naturally, some of its most fervent supporters managed to score front-row seats at Trump's Tampa rally.
It is probably not the case that every red-hatted soul packed into the state fairgrounds on Tuesday still wants "justice" for Seth Rich, or has a lightning bolt—QAnon is also known as "The Storm," because reasons—tattooed on their forearm. Something that is true of all conspiracy theorists, regardless of their partisan leanings, is that they are very adept at finding platforms for their ideas. When your goal is to share your research into the secret liberal pedophilia cabal with the largest possible audience, a televised rally for the television president is a very good place to be.
But if even if Trump isn't a QAnon devotee himself—even if he's never heard of it in his life—he is still responsible for creating the environment that allowed this stuff to become part of Republican politics. Through sheer repetition, he makes what would constitute wild conspiracy theories from any other politician—The media is fake! The FBI is plotting to take down Trump! Peter Strzok and Lisa Page!—into mainstream tenets of his party's platform. He acts as an incubator for the insane, and although adherents don't yet hear him alleging that Tom Hanks is guilty of sex crimes, they recognize him as someone who acknowledges that their paranoia is well-founded, and who welcomes them into the circle with a wink.
As Trump's GOP transforms into the party of delusional people, what might have once been good-faith ideological gaps between Democrats and Republicans are metastasizing into a more fundamental problem: a language barrier that no amount of logic or reason can overcome. The perverse incentive of Trumpism is that the further one wades into its soup of disinformation, the more pleasure they derive from the entire experience.
