THE INFOWARS PRESIDENT
There’s a pivotal moment in Trump becoming president, a night when the seed for his 2016 run was planted: the White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner, April 30, 2011. Leading up to that event, Trump had been the most vocal proponent of a conspiracy called Birtherism, the theory that says President Barack Obama was not a United States-born citizen, that he was born in Kenya and that his Hawaiian birth certificate was a fake.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? There’s something on his birth certificate he doesn’t like,” Trump told the hosts on The View, March 23, 2011.
A week later, Trump was on The Laura Ingraham Show, where he said:
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.”
Over the next week, he’d talk about Birtherism on the Today show on NBC and on Morning Joe on MSNBC and any media outlet that would listen.
But now Obama had the mic. Dressed sharply in a tux, he mentioned he had released his long-form birth certificate earlier in the week and then said he was about to show video of his birth, playing a clip from The Lion King of Simba being held up and presented to the animal kingdom. Then Obama zeroed in on Trump.
“I know he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like—did we fake the moon landing?” The audience, about three thousand members of the media, erupted into laughter. A camera panned to Trump, who offered a sickly, stiff half-smile.
“What really happened in Roswell?” Obama continued when the laughter died down a little. “And where are Biggie and Tupac?” More big laughs and enthusiastic applause. Trump tried to smile again but was staring angrily. Nobody loves media attention more than Trump, but here he was the butt of the joke.
“All kidding aside, we obviously know about your credentials and breadth of experience,” Obama continued. “No seriously, in a recent episode of Celebrity Apprentice… at the steak house, the men’s cooking team, uh, did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks, and there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership, so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf—you fired Gary Busey. And these are the type of decisions that would keep me up at night!” Loud laughter. “Well handled, sir!” Obama called out. Trump smiled slightly and nodded. “Well handled! Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House,” Obama said, turning to a screen behind him, which displayed a photoshopped image of the White House redone with a giant “TRUMP: The White House” sign in neon, gold pillars, crystal chandeliers, bikini babes hanging out in a fountain and golfers milling about the lawn.
The whole room was filled with people laughing their ass off—Trump the conspiracy nut! Trump the tacky! Trump the reality show clown! Here was Trump, often accused of being racist, getting the mic dropped on him by a younger, suave, black President.
Up next was host Seth Meyer, at the time head writer and “Weekend Update” anchor for Saturday Night Live. He continued a more brutal roast of Trump.
“Donald Trump has been saying he’ll run for president as a Republican—which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
“Donald Trump often appears on FOX, which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump’s head.”
By this time, Trump had stopped attempting to smile.
“Donald Trump said recently that he has a great relationship with the blacks,” Meyer wound up, delivering, “but unless The Blacks are a family of white people, I bet he’s mistaken.” Obama, sitting next to him on the dais, began to crack up, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Meyer kept slinging jokes for several long minutes.
After the dinner, Trump and Melania and their security detail beelined out the door. The room had become enemies—Obama, the dishonest media, Saturday Night Live. When he became president, he would decline going to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner every year.
It’s the moment Trump’s conspiracy theorist confidant Roger Stone thinks the Trump candidacy began.
“I think that is the night he resolves to run for president,” Stone said in a PBS interview. “I think that he’s kind of motivated by it. ‘Maybe I’ll run. Maybe I’ll show them all.’”
THE CONSPIRACY CAMPAIGN
ROGER STONE HAD FIRST urged Trump to consider making a run for the presidency after he met him in the ’80s. Stone, political advisor and former lobbyist (his firm in the ’80s included his friend Paul Manafort), had worked in some capacity on campaigns for Richard Nixon (he has a tattoo of Nixon’s face on his back), Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Bob Dole. Stone continued to encourage Trump to run almost every election cycle, and Trump came close to making a serious bid in 2000 and again in 2012.
When Trump’s campaign got rolling in 2015, with Stone as an advisor, it quickly showed it was playing by Stone’s playbook. One of Stone’s rules for politics was “Attack, attack, attack, never defend,” embodied by Trump stomping his Republican opponents in the primaries. He blasted “Low Energy Jeb” Bush and “Little Marco” Rubio until only “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz was left. Trump’s campaign had been seen as a joke when he started, but he had punched his way through and trashed Cruz, even speculating at one point that Cruz’s father had somehow been involved in the JFK assassination. Now he was facing off against “Crooked Hillary.”
Trump had been underestimated. Many people were sick of the Bush and Clinton dynasties in control of the nation’s most powerful office. George H.W. Bush had spent eight years as vice president, then four as president, followed by eight years of Bill Clinton, then eight years of George W. Bush. Obama was the first fresh name in 28 years, but even then, Hillary Clinton spent four years of his administration in a top position as Secretary of State.
There was a lot of fear, anger, and disenfranchisement out there. If Trump could tap into it, he could beat Hillary.
Stone soon found an ally to help him find dirt on Hillary and orchestrate an attack: James Corsi, another conspiracy theorist who would, for a time, have his own InfoWars show. As reported by Jeffrey Toobin for the New Yorker in an article titled “Roger Stone’s and Jerome Corsi’s Time in the Barrel,” Stone and Corsi first connected after they both penned books to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK in 2013. Stone’s book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, as the title suggests, pins Vice President Johnson as the force who orchestrated the fateful day in Dallas. Corsi’s book Who Really Killed Kennedy? blames a Deep State conspiracy of the CIA and organized crime as the force behind the assassination. Corsi had a prior bestseller on John Kerry that came out in the 2004 election cycle, Unfit for Command (co-authored with John O’Neill, who served with John Kerry), the central piece of the political hit job “Swift Boat” attacks.
What connected Corsi with Trump was his 2011 Birtherism bestseller Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President. Trump and Corsi discussed the book and Birtherism several times.
Stone fell out of the Trump campaign in an official capacity in 2015 but was still a strong advocate of his bid for the presidency.
And so Stone and Corsi, after hearing the Russians had hacked Hillary campaign e-mails, hatched a plan to needle WikiLeaks and see what they could find. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, had dumped some of the e-mails and promised more would be on the way. Stone and Corsi worked their contacts to try to get info from Assange about what was in the pipeline. Stone cryptically tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s [sic] time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary,” about six weeks before WikiLeaks dumped a massive amount of Podesta’s e-mails. Focus on the e-mails stole the spotlight for the last month of the campaign and damaged the Clinton campaign.
Stone also recognized the value of Alex Jones. Trump appeared on Alex Jones’ show in December 2015, shortly after announcing his candidacy, hoping to tap into Jones’ audience of millions.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones on air. “I will not let you down.”
Jones and Stone worked together to campaign for Trump. At the Republican National Convention, the duo crashed liberal show The Young Turks on media row. Jones walked on the set and pointed a mic in host Cenk Uygur’s face, then tried to hand him a T-shirt with an image of Bill Clinton on it that read “RAPE.” When Stone jumped into the fray, it turned into a chaotic shouting match, and a fistfight almost broke out.
“Alex, this ain’t your fucking show, and Roger, this surely ain’t your fucking show!” Uygur shouted.
Jones and Stone also took time together to peddle Stone’s book (co-written with Robert Morrow) The Clintons’ War on Women, which presents all of Bill Clinton’s sexual abuse allegations, outside the convention.
In 2017, Stone was offered a spot on InfoWars, co-hosting a show called War Room, and he worked for a while as an InfoWars talking head, and continued to be a frequent guest.
On election night Alex Jones and Roger Stone covered the returns together live for InfoWars. Like many Americans, they were surprised by what they saw unfolding, sure that a conspiracy of massive election fraud—a theory Trump would promote, even after he won, would place Hillary as Commander-in-Chief. To their delight, Trump was victorious.
“Is this Valhalla? Is this the best moment of your political life?” Jones asked Stone, as InfoWars staff handed them glasses of champagne.
“It’s amazing,” Stone sighed happily as they clinked their champagne glasses together.
Days later, according to Jones, President-elect Trump called Jones to thank him and his InfoWars listeners for their support.
“He said, listen, Alex. I just talked to kings and queens of the world, world leaders, you name it, but he said it doesn’t matter, I wanted to talk to you, to thank your audience,” Jones reported.
Later Jones would claim that InfoWars had been offered White House press credentials, a claim that was rebuked by White House spokespersons Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Still, James Corsi, who said he was setting up an InfoWars Washington bureau, was able to get a day pass to gain access to the White House press room.
Using his platform as president, Trump began to promote conspiracies day one when he argued that the media was lying about the size of his inauguration crowd and that he had won despite massive cases of voter fraud—three to five million fraud votes—in California, a claim with no substantiation.
Dozens of conspiracies would follow consistently. Trump claimed that Obama had tapped the phones in Trump Tower during the campaign, that climate change was a “Chinese hoax,” that Democrats had inflated the death toll in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to make him look bad, and as the Midwest elections approached he floated stories of a sinister caravan of migrants marching toward the southern border from Central America. The caravan, Trump tweeted and told reporters, contained MS-13 gang members and Middle Eastern terrorists.
When 79-year-old Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died, Trump seemed to entertain the conspiracy that he had been murdered (he died of natural causes).
“It’s a horrible topic. But they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” Trump responded when asked about the theory by conservative radio host Michael Savage.
He even tried to spin away the famous Access Hollywood tape where he brags that when you’re famous, you can “grab ’em by the pussy” as a conspiracy against him.
“We don’t think that was my voice,” he reportedly explained to a senator and later an adviser.
All of this “cements his status as the InfoWars president,” as CNN’s Brian Stelter noted in an opinion piece. A conspiracy theorist now held the most powerful office in the world.
FAKE NEWS. SAD!
THE MOST PROMINENT CONSPIRACY, according to Trump, was the media bias against him. “Low Ratings CNN,” “The Failing New York Times,” and other news agencies critical of him were “Fake News,” an “enemy of the people,” and even guilty of “treason,” while FOX News (especially his favorites, Fox & Friends and Hannity) received his praise and conspiracy sites like InfoWars were often retweeted by him.
While Trump was calling out mainstream media as “fake,” the proliferation of actual fake news was in overdrive, being pumped out by Russian troll farms, data companies, and political extremists.
The most disturbing development to the fake news industry is the quickly improving technology of deepfakes.
At first, like many emerging technologies, deepfakes were used in porn, where celebrity faces were juxtaposed on porn star bodies. Funny videos appeared, like Steve Buscemi’s face grafted to Jennifer Lawrence’s body accepting an award, but the technology quickly evolved into something that could be weaponized for politics, as U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned Congress in January 2019.
In June 2019, artists working on an exhibition called Spectre posted a video on Instagram that appeared to be a clip of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed on CBS.
“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” the Zuckerberg deepfake says. The video followed a month after Facebook’s refusal to remove an altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was slowed down to make it appear that she was drunkenly slurring her words, uploaded to a Facebook group called “Politics WatchDog,” that quickly went viral with millions of views.
The spreading of deepfake videos might be done by those who see them as confirmation bias by those who don’t care if it’s true or not, entering us into an era where fake videos dropped on voters could undermine elections or cause panic with a false emergency alert.
TRUMP EMBOLDENS WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND OTHER EXTREMISTS
IN ADDITION TO THE CONSPIRACIES he was promoting, Trump’s rise to power had emboldened violent people, people much more dangerous than Richard McCaslin. White supremacy, sometimes trying to cloak itself as an “alt-right” movement, was on the rise.
The alt-right label began to catch on with Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, who called his webzine The Alternative Right, launched in 2010. He tried to give the white nationalist movement a more accessible, low-key look as opposed to the traditional white power groups that featured hillbillies in goofy Klan robes or skinheads covered in tattoos. The alt-right grew to include white identity groups and men’s rights movement groups, like the Proud Boys.
In Charlottesville, North Carolina in August 2017, a rally to “Unite the Right” was held, inspired to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The event produced shocking images of men marching with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us!” A protester, Heather Heyer, died and several were injured after a man rammed his car into anti-racist protestors.
Trump responded in a contentious press conference by saying the protest had “very fine people on both sides” and tried to throw half the blame on the “Alt-Left.”
Although not all conspiracists are white supremacists, the two do overlap on a Venn diagram.
At the heart of many white supremacist theories is that there is a Jewish plot to take over the world, to replace white people with themselves and other ethnic groups, leading to a “white genocide.” White power literature claims we are already controlled by ZOG, the Zionist Occupational Government, Zion and Zionist referring to the Land of Israel.
Belief in these theories goes back to a document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document that first circulated in Russia in the early 1900s, purporting to show an uncovered secret plan that outlined how Jews were plotting global domination. Even after it was revealed to be fraudulent, it kept rolling off the press. When Nazis came to power, it was added to the curriculum of some German schools.
Another white supremacist conspiracy says that the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. Holocaust deniers rely on junk science and say evidence was a hoax perpetrated by the Jewish people to advance their causes by falsely portraying themselves as victims.
Even if he didn’t endorse them directly, President Trump was a president who white power groups believed was an advocate for them. Trump proclaimed that a mighty border wall would be built to keep Mexican “rapists and murderers” out, and that Mexico would pay for it. His travel ban caused chaos at airports as travelers from Muslim countries were denied entry to the U.S. In 2019 he told congresswomen of color that criticized him that they should “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came” and in another tweet called them “savages.”
Hate crimes increased in America during Trump’s campaign and presidency, and in 2018 a record number of hate groups—1,020—was documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old gunman, Patrick Crusius, drove from Dallas to the border town of El Paso, where he shot and killed 22 people and injured 24 more at a Wal-Mart store. He had published an anti-immigration white power manifesto on 8chan before the shooting, and several parts of it parroted Trump’s rhetoric. The shooter described the Hispanic “invasion” as his inspiration to kill, a word Trump frequently uses to describe immigration, as well as Trump’s favorite term to describe media: “fake news.”
Other extremists were also motivated to act in Trump’s name.
In October 2018, a 57-year-old man named Cesar Sayoc mailed 16 pipe bombs to top Democrats including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Sen. Kamala Harris, as well as CNN and top Democratic supporters like George Soros and Robert De Niro.
Sayoc was found living in a van (his parents had kicked him out of their house) plastered with pro-Trump stickers and memes attacking liberals in Adventura, Florida. He pled guilty to 65 felony counts in April 2019 and told a judge that going to Trump rallies was “like a newfound drug.”
In a similar case, 50-year-old Lt. Christopher Hasson of the Coast Guard, a white nationalist, was arrested in February 2019 after it was discovered he was stockpiling weapons and researching home addresses of prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, media figures, and Supreme Court justices.
In both cases, Sayoc’s and Hasson’s hit lists read as enemies of Trump.
And that will be Trump’s legacy more than anything else—the rabid frenzy of paranoia, anger, conspiracy, xenophobia, hatred, and violence he has inspired.