With 'Spygate,' Trump Shows How He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust

[riversedge]

With ‘Spygate,’ Trump Shows How He Uses Conspiracy Theories to Erode Trust

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/politics/trump-conspiracy-theories-spygate.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
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President Trump’s promotion of elaborate, unproven theories appears to be having a distinct effect.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman

May 28, 2018

WASHINGTON — As a candidate, Donald J. Trump claimed that the United States government had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks. He hinted that Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice who died in his sleep two years ago, had been murdered. And for years, Mr. Trump pushed the notion that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Honolulu, making him ineligible for the presidency.

None of that was true.

Last week, President Trump promoted new, unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative: that a “criminal deep state” element within Mr. Obama’s government planted a spy deep inside his presidential campaign to help his rival, Hillary Clinton, win — a scheme he branded “Spygate.” It was the latest indication that a president who has for decades trafficked in conspiracy theories has brought them from the fringes of public discourse to the Oval Office.

Now that he is president, Mr. Trump’s baseless stories of secret plots by powerful interests appear to be having a distinct effect. Among critics, they have fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media that mirror his own.

“The effect on the life of the nation of a president inventing conspiracy theories in order to distract attention from legitimate investigations or other things he dislikes is corrosive,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and biographer. “The diabolical brilliance of the Trump strategy of disinformation is that many people are simply going to hear the charges and countercharges, and decide that there must be something to them because the president of the United States is saying them.”

The effects were evident in Washington on Thursday, when the Justice Department held a pair of unusual briefings with lawmakers to share sensitive information about the special counsel investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign worked with Moscow to sway the contest. Those sessions came about because the president publicly hectored the department to cough up information about an F.B.I. informant he branded a political spy against him.

But Mr. Trump’s willingness to peddle suspicion as fact has implications beyond the Russia inquiry. It is a vital ingredient in the president’s communications arsenal, a social media-fueled, brashly expressed narrative of dubious accusations and dark insinuations that allows him to promote his own version of reality.


Students of Mr. Trump’s life and communication style argue that the idea of conspiracies is a vital part of his strategy to avoid accountability and punch back at detractors, real or perceived, including the news media.

“He’s the blame shifter in chief,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. “Conspiracies, by definition, are things that others do to you. You’re being duped; you’re being fooled; the world is laughing at us. It goes to this idea that you can’t believe anything that you read or see. He has sold us a whole way of accepting a narrative that has so many layers of unaccountable, unsubstantiated content that you can’t possibly peel it all back.”

Like most conspiracy theories, Mr. Trump’s latest has a kernel of truth many Republicans have latched on to. Several news organizations, including The New York Times, have reported that an F.B.I. informant contacted Trump campaign aides who evidence suggested had had suspicious contacts with Russians in 2016 as part of a counterintelligence investigation into possible efforts by Moscow to meddle in the election.


In Mr. Trump’s telling, however, the informant was a spy sent by Mr. Obama and a cabal inside his Justice Department and the intelligence community who were bent on stopping his candidacy.
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Mr. Trump’s talk of conspiracies has also gained currency within a Republican Party establishment that once shunned it.........................................

[stopbush]

1. Nothing new here.

The nutcase CTs about the JFK assassination have been eroding trust in our government and law enforcement agencies for decades.