“You Won’t Have to Vote Again”

Mike Rothschild

As somebody once said, trying to psychoanalyze Donald Trump is like trying to teach hamsters to sing an aria – it will never work and isn’t worth your time.

Sometimes the random stuff he says is really dumb and doesn’t demand analysis to figure out what he’s “really” saying, because he’s saying nothing. Something about sharks and windmills and electric boats, etc. It’s just words that tumble out of an old man’s mouth.

And sometimes the random stuff he says is bone chilling and portentous for an apocalyptic future where America is no longer a free country. Witness Trump’s bizarre and insane comments on July 26th, made when speaking to a summit of Evangelical Christian voters in Florida.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Immediately, Democratic activists and journalists claimed that Trump was telegraphing his intention to make himself president for life and do away with elections, either in principle or entirely, after he wins. “You won’t have to vote anymore…because we won’t have voting anymore, you’ll just have Trump and the people Trump picks to succeed him.”

Not all news outlets saw it that way, of course, leaning into the “he just says stuff” narrative that so many have been relying on for so long. For them, Trump’s remarks were more in line with “You won’t have to vote anymore…because it will be so perfect that Evangelicals will have everything they want.”

Obviously, what Trump meant here is not clear, and really hinges on the exact meaning of the words “have to.” Did he mean “get to” or “need to?” Given that we’re talking about the idea of a dictatorship vs. a democracy, that seems important…right?

It would for any other candidate. But again, hamsters and arias. Trying to figure out what Trump means is usually impossible, because it’s likely he doesn’t know. In this case, however, there is a very good argument to be made Trump shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt about these remarks, because he has already made countless references to him being in office longer than two terms.

Over and over, Trump has publicly endorsed the idea of contravening the 22nd Amendment and running for a third term in office. How would that work, legally? Obviously, he doesn’t know or care. It’s just something he talks about. A lot.

In May, he wondered out loud at the NRA conference, “I don’t know, are we going to be considered three term or two term?” if he won again in 2024. Naturally, his enablers laughed it off as masterful trolling of the overly sensitive media. And maybe it is just trolling and trying to wind up the media to get attention – except he’s been making such comments for years, going all the way back to the last weeks of the the 2020 election.

At a Minnesota rally in August, he “joked” that he wouldn’t come back to the state if he lost it to Joe Biden, “Not for term three, four, five or six.” The next day, he declared that “we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” And he said it again a month later, telling Nevada rallygoers that should he win in 2020, he’d “negotiate” another term, which he was “entitled to.”

Trump has also expressed his approval of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping awarding himself that country’s presidency for life, talked of being awarded “extra time” in office, and made numerous other allusions to somehow getting or being given more years as president than he’s legally entitled to.

His supporters have done the same. In just a few examples of the unhinged drive that “small government conservatives” have for making Donald Trump their god king, disgraced televangelist spawn Jerry Falwell, Jr. tweeted in 2019 that “I now support reparations — Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” a statement Trump tweeted his agreement to. Steve Bannon has claimed, probably rightly, that his audience would be fine with Trump serving a third and even fourth term and then passing the baton off to his sons in the kind of American monarchy that people like Steve Bannon used to oppose. And The American Conservative ran an op-ed just this month that Trump should be able to run for a third term if he wins in 2024 because he’s really popular. That’s the argument.

Obviously, all of this is insane and meaningless. Trump still claims he won the 2020 election (except when he agrees that he lost it) so winning in 2024 would be a “third term” under this entirely non-existent umbrella. There is nobody who can give a president “extra time” or a “redo” or with whom he can “negotiate” more time in office. It should also be noted that other two-term presidents have spoken of hypothetical third terms, including Barack Obama in 2016. Trump has also given interviews where he said he wasn’t interested in a third term, which, again, doesn’t matter because he’s not eligible for one.

And yet…he keeps talking about it. Even if it’s “just trolling” or a “joke,” Trump continues to publicly signal that if he were to win again, he would pull some lever that gave him extra time in office. And given how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails over the last few years, we might find out the 22nd Amendment isn’t quite as clear as we’d like it to be.

But even more than those hypotheticals, Trump has already attempted legal maneuvering to award himself an extra term in office. It was January 6th, 2021 – when a cadre of advisors and influencers followed Donald Trump’s lead and organized a coup attempt to nullify and overturn the results of the 2020 election. Just like Trump’s claims that he was “entitled” to “extra years” in office, he claimed he was entitled to take office again despite losing the election – and his enablers did everything they could to come up with a legal and political framework to make it happen. People died, and America had its first ever election without a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s only absurd and insane until it happens.

So whatever Trump meant by “you won’t have to vote again,” it can’t be decontextualized or swept away. It has to be looked at as yet another reference to our electoral system being thrown out or permanently altered to give one man total control over the government. At some point, there just have to be too many remarks about extra years and third terms and redos and negotiations and being president for life to laugh this off. It’s not a joke, and if it’s meant to be one, it’s not funny.

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Does Donald Trump Actually Think Hannibal Lecter is Real?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

One of Donald Trump’s signature bits of weirdness in 2024 has been repeated references to the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter and comparing him to the plight of undocumented migrants crossing the US/Mexico border.

In speeches going back at least to January, Trump has referred to the liver-eating menace – who is fictional – as “legendary,” “the late, great,” “a wonderful man,”

So why is the former (and maybe future?!?) President of the United States talking about a fictional character as if he were real, and about a truly monstrous character being a “wonderful” and “great” guy?

Psychoanalyzing Trump is like trying to get squirrels to sing an aria – impossible and not worth the time. But there are questions here that can be answered through research, and maybe by answering them, we can get at least closer to an answer to the question that can’t actually be answered – what the hell is going with this?

Does Donald Trump think Hannibal Lecter is real?

It’s fairly clear from the context of Trump’s most reported-on reference to the cannibalistic murderer that the former president knows Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. During a lengthy ramble at a campaign event in New Jersey in May, Trump went on extended riff about Lecter specifically being a character from The Silence of the Lambs.

“Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congrats. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

Despite being unfollowable and bizarre, this makes it pretty clear that Trump knows Lecter was a character in a movie, and Trump is known for making copious references to movies and music in his speeches – though his pop culture knowledge pretty much has a hard out in the early 90s. He even references Lecter’s final line in the movie, though it should be noted that Lecter is not actually dead at the end of the movie. Hardly the worst of Trump’s factual abuses.

What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with undocumented immigrants at all?

Nothing really, which is why the reference is so baffling. At first, it seemed like the reference stemmed from Trump confusing asylum seekers – ie, people crossing the border because they are fleeing violence and persecution, and are hoping to be allowed into the country for their safety – with asylums for the insane. This is likely a reference to FBI agent Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and engineering his release. But none of these things or places are real. And insane asylums in general no longer exist in the United States, nor in much of the rest of the world – though Trump has long called for reopening asylums and institutionalizing more people.

Later, Trump would clarify this bizarre story with his remarks at the Republican National Convention, claiming,

“They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know the press is always on me cause I say this. Has anyone seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?” 

Trump is essentially creating a narrative that other countries are dumping their mentally incapacitated felons on us, which is essentially the same rap that Trump used all the way back in 2015 by kicking off his campaign with the false claim that Mexico was sending rapists and killers in the US. Trump has been making the specific insane asylum claim since at least 2023, and nobody has ever found any evidence this is true. Trump has claimed these are “real stories” but never offers proof to support them, because of course he doesn’t.

Is this the first fictional person Donald Trump has talked about as if they were real?

Not at all! Trump constantly talks about people who may or may not exist with the absolute certainty that they do exist, even if nobody can find them. Trump tells so many stories about burly, tough, great men that probably aren’t real coming up to him with tears in their eyes exclaiming “sir!” and regaling him with how great he is that they even have a name – “sir stories.”

Trump has even told stories about specific people who likely don’t exist. One actually has a name – Jim, a “very, very substantial guy” who used to “go to Paris every year with his wife” but no longer goes to Paris because “Paris is no longer Paris.” When Trump started talking about “Jim who no longer goes to Paris” in 2017, multiple journalists went on a fairly substantial hunt for who he was talking about, but nobody could figure it out. Later that year, Trump claimed he was no longer listening to Jim’s badmouthing of Paris, though, again, it’s not clear who exactly Jim was or whether Jim was real.

This type of easy conflation of real and fake doesn’t stop at people. Trump’s New Jersey golf course has a monument to a horrifying Civil War battle called the “River of Blood” that supposedly took place there, though no historical record or expert can confirm that such a battle ever took place. And Trump consistently brags of his winning the state of Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award some time before 2016, though, again, this award does not exist.

Why is he doing this?

We can’t really know why Trump has picked out Hannibal Lecter specifically, but we have established that Trump doesn’t actually think Lecter is real, that he’s linked Lecter to undocumented immigration through an “asylum” connection that’s not real, and that he’s done this kind of conflation before.

But none of those are reasons why he does it. The real reason might be that Trump doesn’t know what the word “asylum” means, and that would make sense.

But there’s another reason why, and it actually lies in Trump’s comments about his comments on Lecter: that the media “goes crazy” when he does it. A former president and current nominee talking about a fictional serial killer as if he were a real and great guy is newsworthy, and Trump knows it. He knows that it will be written about and get the “lying fake news media” all lathered up. And it’s not as if his supporters care, they love this kind of attention for Trump as much as Trump loves it.

So whether Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, wonderful, and deserving of the Michigan Man of the Year award isn’t the point. We can’t really know if he thinks this is all real or not. The bigger point is that this is just another bizarre and awful and racist thing that Trump talks about, and that Trump knows the media will talk about him talking about. Like so much of Trumpworld, the details don’t matter – only the coverage.

Jim who doesn’t go to Paris anymore would agree. If he existed.

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It’s Not a Coup

Mike Rothschild

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The denunciations and conspiracy theories came fast after President Biden announced he was stepping aside from the 2024 election and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris.

Democratic activists and pro-Biden influencers decried the decision as a coup by monied donors and media figures, disenfranchising the millions of people who had voted for Biden in the 2024 primary. It was nothing less than a mass negation of the 81 million voices who had chosen Biden in 2020, a stab in the back of the most impactful president in a generation, and a seizing of power that went against the very foundations of representative democracy.

Kidding! That was all MAGA-worshipping Republicans who are suddenly very concerned about the sanctity of Democratic voters and stopping insurrections against duly elected presidents.

Yes, the same people who have spent nearly four years claiming Joe Biden was illegitimately elected by 81 million non-existent people are suddenly very angry about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election. Conspiracy theory influencers and MAGA mouthpieces who constantly call Democrats pedophiles and demons who must be cleansed from the earth are deeply upset that Democratic primary voters aren’t being listened to and nurtured in their “betrayal.” And those voices who were the loudest in supporting an actual attempt at a coup – the January 6th insurrection, where people died and the Vice President was nearly murdered – are now convinced that Biden stepping down of his own volition is a coup that is somehow worse than that actual insurrection (which, of course, was totally fake.)

Like this dude, a Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo who’s close friends with fellow Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo Elon Musk, might be more convincing in his attempt to apply a “Stab in the Back Myth” to Biden if he hadn’t just spoken at the Republican National Convention claiming that, among other things, Biden “provoked” Russia into invading Ukraine.

How can a person believe that January 6th wasn’t a real insurrection, but Joe Biden being convinced to step aside was? Isn’t this just hypocrisy of the highest order? Or are they really concerned for the future of democracy and feeling like what the Democrats did to him was wrong, even if they don’t like him?

If you’re confused, that’s the point. They don’t actually mean any of this, and none of it is meant to make sense.

The concern, the fear for the future of democracy, the outrage on behalf of Biden voters: it’s all an act. Not a single MAGA influencer or politician actually thinks the nomination was “stolen” from Biden, nor do they care even one bit about the potential disenfranchisement of Democrats. They would rather see Democratic primary voters lined up and shot than be taken seriously in their grievances. Do you seriously believe that people utterly obsessed with passing laws to make voting harder and more exclusive actually care about making votes count?

The people who would literally die to support a president who would never willingly give up power are pretending to decry a president willingly giving up power.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for people to hold two contradictory beliefs – that Joe Biden is a fake president whose real election is being overturned. That sort of cognitive dissonance is common among conspiracy theorists, with one of the most famous examples being a survey of 9/11 truthers who answered yes to believing both that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when US Special Forces killed him in 2011, and that he’s still alive. Ultimately, the details of conspiracist belief can contradict each other because they’re all made up. Barack Obama could be an incompetent bumbling idiot while also being an evil genius who spent decades pretending to be American with nobody figuring out because both beliefs are fictional, and based on nothing other than wishful thinking.

The Trump supporters claiming that the Democrats ousted Biden in a coup, on the other hand, don’t believe any of it. Their outrage stems not at all from sympathy for pro-Biden Democrats and entirely from wanting Biden to stay in the race. Trump was outpolling Biden in numerous critical swing states, and had driven the Democratic electorate into a kind of apathy that almost certainly portended another Trump victory, and what would then likely be his complete takeover of American society.

With Biden out and Harris presumably in, these people are going to have to completely revamp their approach to winning what had been a moribund election that had seemingly been dragging on for years.

They were adamant that Biden stay in the race because they believed he’d lose. And now that he’s out of the race, they’re pretending those beliefs stemmed from genuine concern for the democratic process, rather than owning the libs and pleasing Trump. In fact, Republicans care so little for Biden’s actual presidency that many are demanding he resign right now rather than play out the last five months of his term.

Yes, the people who still think Biden isn’t the real president want Biden to end his fake presidency because he won’t get the opportunity to be real president again.

This is pure insanity that is not designed to cohere on any level. In fact, there is nothing undemocratic about a candidate making a decision to step back. He can’t be forced to run for president, and if he’s changed his mind, then he can do that for whatever reason.

The only thing anyone needs to know about the right-wing outcry of a “coup” is that it’s meaningless and designed to drive a wedge between Democrats who are now, ironically, more united than at any time during the last year. Republicans are panicking, and it’s transparently obvious.

Nobody knows what happens next, how Harris will do against Trump, or what other surprises this utterly insane election cycle has in store. But one thing we can all agree on is that people who cheered January 6th and called Biden’s stepping aside a coup are hypocrites who can safely be ignored. They are lying to their followers and trying to drive Democrats to distraction with their trolling.

The featured picture of this piece is of the coup of 18 Brumaire, the bloodless revolution of 1799 that ended the French Revolution and brought Napoleon to power as a dictator. That was a seizure of power in a non-violent way that soon led to two decades of brutal war all over Europe.

Joe Biden walking away is a candidate for office deciding he didn’t want to be a candidate for office anymore. It wasn’t a stab in the back, it wasn’t an abrogation of voter wishes, and it definitely wasn’t a coup.

But they know that already.

The Rothschilds and the Scofield Bible

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Greetings! This is the kind of research-intensive content I’ll soon be putting on my Patreon page. If you get something out of this and feel you can, I’d truly appreciate an $8 per month subscription. Thanks

Sometimes a conspiracy theory emerges that you immediately know is absolutely designed with just the right combination of stupidity and malice that you have to drop everything to debunk it.

On July 17th, I got a tip from Ben Lorber, co-author of the new book on antisemitism Safety Through Solidarity (which is great and you should read it) of a clip from Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show of him and country singer John Rich discussing how “the Rothschilds were connected” to the printing and distribution of what’s known as the Scofield Bible, an End Times-focused edition of the Bible published in 1909 that contained extensive notes and references written by American theologian CI Scofield.

One particular clip of the interview features Rich, who is not an expert on the Rothschilds, telling Carlson, who is not an expert on anything, that another preacher named John Darby, who popularized a concept called “The Secret Rapture” was connected to “the Rothschilds.”

“Interesting” Carlson intones, with the two discussing how this philosophy lead to the warping of US foreign policy and the deaths of “a lot of people.”

I am the farthest possible thing from an expert on Christian eschatology, the history of American charismatic movements, the growth of Christian Zionism and its relation to its Jewish counterpart, or the influence of the Scofield Bible on anything. But I am something of an expert on the Rothschilds, as my book Jewish Space Lasers is about the Rothschild myth and its role in antisemitism. And I am definitely an expert on how conspiracy theorists like John Rich and Tucker Carlson say stuff that doesn’t mean anything, put it behind a wall of creepy music and quick edits, and spread it around to their followers as gospel truth.

So why are we talking about the links between a wealthy Jewish family and an End Times Bible? Did the Rothschilds fund the Scofield Bible? Did they control John Darby?

With numerous references to the Book of Revelation and other End Times concepts, the Scofield Reference Bible was the perfect scripture for the upheaval and bloodshed of the Great War and later of World War II. It sold millions of copies and laid the groundwork for the “tribulation industry” of End Times preachers and evangelical personalities like the authors of Left Behind, Late Great Planet Earth author Hal Lindsey, and many others. These apocalyptic concepts continue to be a driving force in American evangelical Christianity, and numerous believers in the idea of a Rapture or dispensationalism (the idea that history is divided into “Eras” in which God has different plans for humanity) have risen to prominent positions in the US government. In this version of Zionism, Israel must belong to the Jewish people – so it can serve as the place where the Tribulation begins, presumably causing the deaths of countless Jewish people.

All of this is hopelessly complex, and could fill entire bookshelves with tomes I’m not educated enough to understand. But the Rothschild link is simple, so I’ll focus on that.

Scofield was an American preacher and author who lived from 1843 to 1921. Darby was a British author who first popularized the ideas of pre-tribulation rapture and dispensationalism that Scofield referred to, and lived from 1800 to 1882. In the research and writing of Jewish Space Lasers, I never saw any reference to Darby or Scofield having worked for or ever come across the Rothschilds. The family had no real presence in America in 1909, and its power in Europe had drastically waned. There’s no reason why the family would have invested in the funding or distribution of a New Testament that, as Jews, they wouldn’t have had any interest in. No edition of the Reference Bible I found had a reference to the Rothschilds, though I confess that I haven’t looked through every edition ever printed. And I can’t find any primary source that connects the Scofield Bible, Scofield himself, or Darby to the family.

Carlson and Rich’s claim that the Rothschilds helped create or fund “Christian Zionism” also don’t carry any kind of evidentiary weight. Many Rothschilds were Zionists, of course. Many also were not. The family is extremely large and varied in its beliefs and priorities, and so simply ascribing “the Rothschilds” as having done something is a meaningless statement that only serves to fuel antisemitic conspiracy theories. And again, we’re talking about Tucker Carlson, here. Similarly, trying to link the Balfour Declaration to Christian Zionism because it’s a letter written by Lord Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild is nonsensical.

The sources connecting all of this together are impossibly thin, mostly consisting of blogs and a few podcasts that throw the accusation out without evidence. The closest thing to a primary source connecting Darby to the Rothschilds and Christian Zionism is a reference to the family in a 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review claiming that 19th Century British aristocrat and pre-millennial Zionist Lord Shaftesbury “was instrumental in the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which brought the Darbyites and other evangelicals, wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, together with the highest levels of English aristocracy, to officially claim Palestine for the Empire.”

It should be noted that Executive Intelligence Review is a publication of the crank conspiracy theorist and activist Lyndon LaRouche, and often published incomprehensible and antisemitic nonsense – including a 1996 article that was likely the first to connect the Rothschilds to future conspiracy theory magnet George Soros. So as primary sources go, EIR is firmly in the category of ones that can be ignored.

In digging around for something that connects Darby/Scofield to the Rothschilds, the only real link that makes any kind of sense is that the Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, the prestigious academic house that’s been in business since 1586 and has become the largest university press in the world. A number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that the Rothschilds “own” or “control” Oxford University Press, and therefore were critical in the printing and distribution of the Scofield Bible.

But again, none of this is actually true. The Rothschilds don’t “own” Oxford University Press – the University of Oxford does. And Oxford has existed since around 1096, roughly 700 years before Mayer Amschel Rothschild rose to prominence as a banker and court Jew in the Free City of Frankfurt.

Simply put, if there’s a link between the Rothschilds and Darby, Scofield, the Scofield Bible, Christian Zionism, or its influence on American politics; nobody has bothered writing about it, documenting it, or exploring it in any way. But the trick about conspiracy theories claiming “the Rothschilds control ______” is that they don’t require evidence. The people spreading them have no interest in backing up their claims (tellingly, John Rich offers no evidence and Tucker Carlson asks for none), only in spreading them. And in going viral, which the claims did.

This unevidenced nonsense spreads because of generations of the similar spread of past antisemitic nonsense about the Rothschilds controlling banking, finance, politics, media, entertainment, global events, and medicine. Strip away all of the names and concepts unique to this one theory and you’re left with another version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document making grandiose claims of Jewish control while offering no evidence to support them. Over and over, influencers make these claims, spread them around without evidence, and reap the rewards. And Jews suffer the consequences of this hate and mythmaking.

Like The Protocols, the idea that “The Rothschilds” funded an End Times Bible to exert control over American Christianity is just as pernicious – and just as false.

All the World’s a Staged False Flag

Mike Rothschild5 Comments

In the seconds and minutes after a traumatic event, all we know is what we already knew before the event. As information starts to come in – what exactly happened, how it happened, who did it – that starts to change. Questions get answered, new questions arise, an overall narrative starts to emerge. But the moment we learn of something truly enormous and unexpected, such as an airliner flying into the World Trade Center or a mass shooting at a school, we don’t know anything other than the fact that something happened. And we want to know more.

Our minds demand more information, more details, more facts. We need to know what’s going on, even if nobody even knows what’s going on. And we want to talk about it, even if we don’t know what we’re even talking about yet. Social media and the speed that information travels now have exacerbated this need to concoct a story when one isn’t available, but it’s always been part of us.

With all this in mind, nobody should be surprised that the seconds and minutes after a 20-year-old loser with a rifle tried to assassinate Donald Trump, conspiracy theories exploded on social media. It was inevitable, given the intensity of the situation, the infrequent nature of such assassination attempts, and of course, the fact that involved Donald Trump.

Each block of conspiracy theories fell neatly down partisan lines.

Pro-Trump influencers have spent months obsessing over the “deep state” trying to assassinate Trump because he’s going to beat Joe Biden (again!) and they only way they can stop this is by taking Trump off the board. And anti-Trump influencers believe that Trump is so craven that he’d stage his own assassination attempt, complete with a pre-made photo-op, to change the conversation from Biden’s refusal to step aside.

The information you allow yourself to take in depends entirely on the information you’ve already taken in.

None of this should be surprising if one has followed Western politics and media for the last few decades. Within hours of the World Trade Center collapsing, major conspiracy figures like Alex Jones and Bill Cooper claimed the hijackings were staged as an excuse to detonate charges on the main girders of the buildings and bring them down in order to take control of the American people. It now takes minutes for “citizen journalists” to declare that “something is wrong” with the story when news breaks of a school shooting. Most of these conspiracy theories are repackaged versions of ones that have come before, and quickly fade out.

What’s new with the Trump shooting is that the volume of right wing conspiracy theories is being overwhelmed by the volume of conspiracy theories from the left. While many Republicans have fallen back on the usual narrative of a surprisingly incompetent deep state hit job, many Democrats have embraced the false and deranged notion that Trump staged his own attempted murder, based on “proof” that doesn’t stand up to logic or scrutiny, and sticking to the idea even once it became clear that multiple people, including the shooter, were killed in those furious few seconds.

“What, you think Trump wouldn’t do it? You think he cares about anyone but himself dying?” is that believers will ask, though these are rhetorical questions designed to reinforce belief. “Why would you put anything past him?”

Left wing conspiracy theories aren’t new, of course. But they’ve never quite caught on the way right-wing myths and disinformation have. They aren’t as compelling, they aren’t as profitable, they don’t offer the same heady stakes and cartoonish villains. And they aren’t equivalent. Left-leaning nonsense doesn’t have the same rotten core of antisemitism and racism and hate and fear. It wasn’t left-wing conspiracy theories that fueled January 6th or Charlottesville. Even health freedom and antivax conspiracy theories, once more the domain of progressives, have been usurped by the far right – Steve Bannon is just as likely to shill for “vaccine detox” as he is for “white genocide” these days.

But that’s changed as Donald Trump’s grip on American politics and discourse has tightened. Trump is an accelerant for left wing conspiracism in the same way Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were for the right. They are all-powerful, pure evil, devious and cunning in ways that defy description, and yet never quite pulls off their dark plans for world domination and mass slavery. They kill anyone they want, but manage to get caught on the internet. They create vast networks of underground bases and camps and terror cells that, for some reason, mostly remain dormant. And when they do activate – a mass shooter “brainwashed by MKUltra” or something like that – the internet figures it out easily.

These are cartoon villains. They’re Cobra Commander in the 80’s GI Joe Cartoon, building a vast army of soldiers and tanks and lasers, hatching plan after plan, and never winning. And like all “world domination” theories, they give a free pass to the real villains. They absolve the food conglomerates, the mass polluters, the actual dictators, the holders of medical debt and the inventors of “lunch debt.” These people get off – while the phony Saturday morning TV villains of the “deep state” keep pumping out their ham-fisted plots in public.

The idea that Trump staged his own assassination, built around one lousy marksman shooting him just close enough to his head to get a once-in-a-century photo, then having that marksman killed, is just as goofy and unserious a plan as much of the far right’s supposed chicanery. Sure, it’s fun to tweet about your belief that WWE-trained showman Trump could duck down just long enough to smear blood on his ear and pop up for a first pump, but once you find out people are dead, that’s not going to stick as a story.

Once you find out the shooting was real, it can’t be staged anymore, right? The problem with conspiracy theories is that they don’t function in the realm of logic. It can be real AND staged. Why not? The details don’t matter and are entirely fungible. You claim no kids died at Sandy Hook, then when overwhelming evidence emerges that they definitely did, you just claim they died but not the way THEY are telling us. The theory changes, but it doesn’t really change.

Likewise, Trump’s “shooting” clearly was real, but it can also be fake. Arguing over the details is pointless, because they’re meaningless. The idea that anyone would let some clown with no training shoot at their head on the off chance that they’d hit their ear is comical – but Trump is evil and Project 2025 will turn us all into breeding slaves in a Christofacist hellscape, so can we really say he wouldn’t do it?

I caught twelve kinds of hell from liberal influencers when I pushed back at the conspiracy theory that Trump had his ex-wife Ivana murdered by throwing her down the stairs, then used her fake burial to hide classified documents in her empty casket. I didn’t push back at it because I love Trump – far from it. I pushed back because it was insane and totally devoid of evidence, while sidestepping actual evidence, like Ivana being in so much pain from degenerating hips that she could barely walk. But people who have turned Trump in dime store villain capable of doing anything to anyone didn’t want to hear it.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories how they transform their believers into conspiratorial people. They invert trust and faith. They wrap certainty in a blanket of nonsense. And they make people paranoid and joyless, distrustful and cynical. They show us a real and traumatic event and make it cartoonish and bizarre in ways that don’t actually help us process and react to them.

Political assassinations are pretty common in the US. Four presidents have been shot dead, many others have had guns pulled on them or shots fired at them while in office or around then. Gerald Ford had guns pulled on him twice in three weeks. Reagan was nearly killed by a shooter, while Harry Truman survived an assassination attempt as VP. Likewise, the atmosphere at Trump events and around Trump in general is one of chaos and violence and a sickening kind of “anything can happen” energy. It’s not surprising that this happened, it’s more surprising that it took this long.

So the attempt to kill Donald Trump doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. Like so many other hinge points in history, it just requires a dope with a gun who maybe shifts the tides of a generation depending on if they can hit a target or not.

But we process information through conspiracy theories. We fill gaps in our understanding with garbage rather than simply sit in that lack of understanding. We make up better stories than the ones the officials give us because we like stories. And we cast our villains as being so evil they must be stopped while also being so incompetent that they never quite start.

We know who and what Donald Trump is. We don’t need conspiracy theories to make him worse or more devious. We only need look at his history and his plans for the future. It’s all there and obvious. Him “smearing blood on his ear” or conspiring with the Secret Service to be photographed on his good side only obscures his danger in a haze of nonsense.

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