Donald Trump doesn’t try to campaign on any real issues. Instead, he traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy theories as he tries to get Americans to go down a rabbit hole into a dark alternate reality where immigrants kidnap and eat cats, the 2020 election was stolen, vaccines are poison, and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not really Black.
He has filled his third campaign for the presidency with a team that peddles conspiracy theorists, including Laura Loomer, JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Racism, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism are at the heart of many of Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories, but it is up to Trump’s most loyal MAGA cultists to sort out the political meaning of each new harebrained idea they are told to believe. Meanwhile, the nation’s political press corps lags far behind trying to fact-check Trump and his minions, like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.
Above all, Trump has built his campaign around conspiracy theories designed to stoke racist fears of immigrants and minorities, exploiting the hysteria that grips many white Americans over the demographic changes of the last few decades that have transformed the U.S. into a more diverse nation.
