We Marinate in Conspiracy Today. Who’s to Blame? Partly, Donald Trump.

History should bother to record the dark irony that the apparent third (or fourth, or maybe fifth) assassination attempt against Donald Trump came at the end of a month when the conspiracy theory that the first high-profile attempt was staged by Trump and his people barged its way into the news cycle. That would be the shooting in July 2024 involving gunman Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania. If you’ve ventured down this rabbit hole, you’re familiar with some of the details: that Trump’s ear, which we were told at the time was singed by a bullet, seems miraculously and mysteriously to have grown back; that a crane just happened to be there to hoist a large flag into place just in time for the iconic “fight!” photo; and more.

This conspiracy is being peddled not on the left, but by figures on the right who’ve turned against Trump: for example, Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent, who recently resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. Butler conspiracy theories arose literally within hours of the shooting, but over these past couple of weeks they’ve really taken hold in certain corners of the right.

With conspiracy so thick in the political air, it shouldn’t surprise us then that conspiracy theories are already whipping around about Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner too. Suspicions about the shooting that interrupted the annual party at the Washington Hilton emanate mostly from the left, though some right-wing figures are raising questions too.

For the record, these theories all seem ridiculous to me. There have been conspiracy theories about presidential assassinations, certainly the successful ones, since forever. John Wilkes Booth, as we know, was part of a conspiracy, a small circle of men and women; but there were some who alleged a wider Confederate plot. It always has been and always will be the case that for some people, normal, factual explanations for large and cataclysmic events will never suffice.

It’s always been true. But why does it seem so much worse today? Is it, in fact, worse? Yes, it is. True, it’s hard to outdo the Kennedy assassination in terms of sheer volume of conspiracy theories. But the difference between those conspiracies and today’s variants is that there was no razor-sharp ideological edge to the JFK conspiracies. No one advanced the grassy knoll theory for reasons of partisan advantage; it was about mystery. But today, conspiracies almost exclusively serve a partisan purpose—whether it’s clashes between ideological opponents or factional infighting, it’s always about advancing a cause.

Both sides have played this game. In some corners of the left, there were for example a few conspiracy theories around George W. Bush and September 11—it was an inside job, the Mossad did it, he knew about it. And in 2004, a few people bought the story that that election was rigged, although it’s worth noting that the leading theoretician of that cause was none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who hasn’t turned out to be much of a liberal or Democrat—but he has been a conspiracist par excellence whose woolly beliefs are being transformed into public health policy to the detriment of the nation.

If you’re looking around for culprits for our culture’s march into these swamps, you need to look elsewhere. You might start with so-called Christians like Jerry Falwell, who appeared in and helped distribute the 1994 film The Clinton Chronicles, which trafficked in several conspiracies about Clinton, up to and including the idea that he had people murdered (because they were about to tell the world about his secret drug-running operation, you see; no, I’m not making this up).

Clinton conspiracy-mongering was an industry. I was about to add the adjective “cottage,” but it was more than that; a McMansion, at least, or a respectably sized strip mall. A lot of it was set in motion by a group of dishonest reactionary cranks down in Arkansas like the late Larry Nichols, whom I interviewed in Little Rock back in 1992 and whose very juicy “leads” I decided not to pursue. These folks were usually angry that Clinton had ethically not appointed them to some patronage post they didn’t deserve. Then, knowing what Goebbels knew about accusing your foe of that which you yourself were doing, they called Clinton unethical, and it stuck. I could go on and on and on about all this. It’s not that Clinton never did anything wrong. He did. But as Yogi Berra might have put it, about 70 percent of the stuff about him—and Hillary—was 90 percent made up.

Then there were the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. The birther theories are only the most obvious in this category. You may have forgotten some of the more baroque ones—the cocaine-fueled homosexual affair, the general idea that he wanted to bring America to its knees, peddled by the hustler Dinesh D’Souza.

Of course, one other person figured prominently in these Obama theories. What was his name again? Oh, right; Donald Trump. Remember when he was going to produce proof that Obama was born in Kenya? He never got around to that, somehow. He did, however, find the time to charge that Obama was spying on him during his first campaign—a “crime” Trump referred to as “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.” Again, I could go on, and on. And of course there are the added Trump conspiracy theories that were not about Obama: the “deep state,” the “rigged election,” the Hunter Biden fantasies, and so on.

There’s another difference between left and right here. On the left, yes, as I noted, there are some conspiracy theories, but by and large, if there’s no proof, liberal and mainstream news organizations don’t give them much oxygen, and Democratic politicians generally don’t go around repeating them. But on the right, many media outlets relentlessly promote these conspiracy theories, and politicians repeat them without any regard for whether they’re true. Ask the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, about that one.

We marinate in conspiracy these days. It’s mostly because of the way the right has played hardball since Bill Clinton’s time. But to a considerable degree it’s because of Donald Trump himself.

I’m sure most of America is grateful that the sitting president wasn’t assassinated. Love the incumbent or hate him, that would be a traumatic national event. But he would be quite mistaken to expect an outpouring of sympathy from a country that strongly disapproves of the job he’s doing, and where 55 percent of the people, according to last week’s Fox News poll, consider him mentally unfit to serve as president. He is still prosecuting a deeply unpopular war, building massive detention camps, and proving both incompetent to manage the economy and impotent to impact gas prices. Cole Tomas Allen didn’t change any of that.