Trump, the GOP, and Conspiracy Theories

What I told a Slovak outlet

I think I’ve mentioned before that a Slovak media outlet, Dennik N, occasionally asks me for my opinion about the American political scene (those lucky Slovaks!).

I’m including here a response to a query they sent me last week. As always when I do this, I assume that some of their readers will be less informed about the basics of American politics, so I include some remedial civics in my responses. Additionally, in ways that probably don’t help, I try to simplify some of the language I use in anticipation of translation issues.

Anyway, without further ado, here it is:

You asked when did the Republican Party in politics take a turn towards conspiracy theories and rhetoric that leans towards the far right?

It would be complicated to trace the evolution of the Republican Party into its current form. Some would argue that the Republican Party began evolving into more of a hard right party in the 1990s. Others would say it was earlier. And it’s a related but different question as to whether hard right parties today, in the United States and elsewhere, are more prone to conspiracy theories than other kinds of political parties in democracies. 

Some proportion of voters across the political spectrum are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories. But what stands out about the Republican Party today isn’t only that conspiracy theories play such a dominant role in its identity and branding, but also that pursuing conspiracy theories has really come to dominate its governing agenda. 

Donald Trump didn’t invent conspiracy theories, of course, but he’s one of the primary reasons they’ve become so central to the Republican Party. This we can trace to 2011, when Trump first made serious noise about running for president as a Republican candidate. That year, he championed an already existing conspiracy theory about how President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States, that he had a fake birth certificate and, therefore, should have been ineligible to run for president in the first place. This was all a complete lie. Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after Hawaii became a state. In classic Trump fashion, he kept promising to produce indisputable evidence that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake and that he was really born in Africa (and you can’t escape the obviously racist intentions of that claim). 

Of course, Trump never produced any such evidence (because there wasn’t any), and also never stopped talking as if he had or would show beyond a doubt that he was right. In the midst of all this, Obama released a more detailed copy of his birth certificate, which caused the controversy to die down. And Trump didn’t end up running for president in 2012, but he had already excited a base of voters who were prone to thinking that way. Indeed, when Trump did decide to run for President in 2015, polls consistently showed, amazingly, that a majority of Republicans still believed that Obama probably or definitely wasn’t born in the United States. And that group formed the core of Trump’s base of support.

I won’t detail the whole history of our country since then. But the birth certificate episode was, in some ways, a template for what Trump tried to do to overturn the 2020 election. Again, without a shred of credible evidence, he repeatedly insisted that he was the rightful winner of that election and that he would produce indisputable evidence any day now to prove that was the case and that Joe Biden had stolen the election from him. 

In several dozen legal cases, efforts by lawyers representing Trump to reverse the vote count in various American states were thrown out because of a lack of evidence. But those efforts helped spawn the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop the United States Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the legal winner of the presidency. And polls still show that a majority of Republicans, egged on by rightwing media, such as FOX News, continue to believe that Joe Biden won the election because of fraud.

It's in the nature of partisanship that supporters of a candidate or party are more likely to exaggerate the misdeeds of the other side and brush off or downplay similar misdeeds by one’s own side. But when you ask about conspiracy theories, you’re talking about the idea that a secret plot has taken over a political system, while never producing any evidence of that plot. And even after your made-up claims have been investigated, and no evidence has been produced to support your claims, rather than admitting you’re wrong, or moving on, you just insist that the lack of evidence is itself part of the conspiracy. 

One way this is playing out now is in Republican efforts to impeach President Biden, that is to attempt to remove him from office. It’s extraordinary, because even many of the Republican elites who say they support impeaching Biden admit there’s no actual evidence against him. They’re doing it, overwhelmingly, because Donald Trump wants them to. And he wants them to both because he believes it will help him in his campaign against Joe Biden in 2024 and because he’s convinced himself that his impeachment in 2021 for trying to overturn the 2020 election was unfair, wrong and itself part of the conspiracy to deny him his victory in that election.

To go back to my earlier point about conspiracy theories becoming a substitute for a normal political and policy agenda, Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the widespread support for them among ordinary Republicans and among Republican elites are playing a role in the current United States budget situation. Republicans have a very slight majority in the House of Representatives and Democrats have a very slight majority in the United States Senate. In order for legislation to become law, it has to be approved by both the House and the Senate and then signed by the president. The American fiscal year ends September 30, so new budgets have to be approved by October 1 and both the Senate and the House have to approve them. If they aren’t, the government has to start shutting down operations. 

Republicans in the House appear determined to block any effort to pass a budget. The leader of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is a Republican, clearly wants to pass one, because failing to do so will lead to a government shutdown, which he assumes will be bad, politically, for his party. But there is a significant faction of Republicans in the House who don’t really care about that and are more focused on impeaching Joe Biden, again based on what many of them admit is no evidence. They’re doing this because they want to support Trump. As a result, McCarthy has said he would begin an investigation into President Biden, hoping that would then lead to the passage of a budget. So far, that hasn’t worked.

This is just one example of how conspiratorial thinking has come to play a central role in driving the Republican agenda. And it will remain so as long as Donald Trump is the dominant figure in the Republican Party. Whether this will persist and in what form, if and when Trump is no longer on the scene, is harder to say. 

If Trump is removed from that equation, it’s likely that conspiracy theories would play less of a role in dominating the GOP agenda. But I do think Trump has nurtured a particular style of politics that other Republicans, including some who are running for the Republican nomination for president now, have latched onto, either because they really believe this stuff or because they think it will play well with base voters. If Trump loses in 2024, that will likely poke a big hole in the conspiracy bubble that dominates today’s GOP, though I don’t think it will disappear immediately or completely. And if Trump wins, things will only get worse.