When President Biden announced he was suspending his campaign for president, Donald Trump and some of his supporters stitched together a series of conspiracy theories about Biden\u2019s health, his motives for dropping out, and even whether he was still alive.<\/p>\n
Those false assertions built on years of reality-bending messages from Trump and others on the right that have helped polarize the electorate and shaken Americans\u2019 belief in a shared set of facts. While political conspiracy theories have long been a feature of American life, today\u2019s diffuse army of conspiracists are especially able to sow doubt, experts say, and are poised to undermine faith in the coming election less than four years after such false conspiracy theories fomented a violent attack on the Capitol.<\/p>\n
Hours after Biden said on Sunday that he was dropping out of the race, which came days after he received his covid diagnosis, Trump set the tone in a social media post. \u201cDoes anybody really believe that Crooked Joe had Covid? No,\u201d Trump wrote, challenging the announcement from Biden\u2019s own physician describing his symptoms.<\/p>\n
In the same post, Trump claimed, without evidence, that Biden \u201chad wanted to get out\u201d of the presidential race since the night of the debate that sparked concerns nationally over the ability of Biden, 81, to serve a second term in the White House. (Biden acceded to calls that he resign from the race only after weeks of pressure from members of his own party.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened to Joe Biden,\u201d Trump adviser Chris LaCivita posted on X on Monday. \u201cWhere is he? We haven\u2019t seen him since July 17th \u2026 around the time he \u2018got covid\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen was the last time anyone saw Joe Biden?\u201d asked Charlie Kirk, the founder and CEO of Talking Points USA, a youth-focused conservative advocacy group, who spoke at last week\u2019s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.<\/p>\n
Trump and his allies provided no evidence for their conjecture, and the false assertions built up to the allegation advanced by some on the far right that Vice President Harris\u2019s elevation to succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate amounted to an illegal government takeover.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump is merely asking relevant questions \u2014 something the media should do after they were exposed for helping Biden cover up his cognitive decline for the past four years,\u201d said Steven Cheung, communications director for Trump\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n
Even before Biden announced he was suspending his campaign, Trump supporters predicted his covid diagnosis would keep him from running. Joey Mannarino, a self-described conservative populist with half a million followers on X, posted that Biden would get long covid, a condition he dismissed as fake, and quit the race. \u201cJust wait,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
The day Biden released a letter announcing his decision to leave the race, Laura Loomer, a right-wing anti-Muslim activist with a history of publishing falsehoods, wrote to her more than a million followers on X that she had heard from an unnamed source that Biden had not written the letter. Feminist author turned conspiracist Naomi Wolf reposted Loomer\u2019s message. Another account, Slave to Christ, posted an image of Biden\u2019s signature at the base of the letter, claiming that it did not match previous examples of his penmanship.<\/p>\n
Wolf in turn reposted the message, which spurred hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to chime in, questioning the authenticity of Biden\u2019s signature to his 1.3 million X followers. The conspiracy theories persisted even after Biden called in to Harris\u2019s televised appearance Monday at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., to rally staffers\u2019 support for the vice president \u2014 his first public remarks since dropping out of the race.<\/p>\n
Kirk on Monday posted on X that he had had \u201ca weird lead\u201d on a story from a source close to the police department in Las Vegas, where Biden visited last week, that contradicted the \u201cofficial story\u201d that Biden had contracted covid. Kirk\u2019s source, he said, indicated that the U.S. Secret Service had told the local police that an \u201cemergency situation\u201d involving Biden required a \u201cmedevac\u201d to transport him to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. \u201cApparently the rumor mill in the police department was that Joe Biden was dying or possibly already dead,\u201d Kirk wrote to his more than 3 million followers. Kirk did not specify why his unnamed source asserted that Biden would travel to Johns Hopkins. He arrived later that evening at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.<\/p>\n
Kirk wrote that he had dismissed the tip at the time, but given that Biden had not been seen in public for several days, Kirk wrote that he was curious \u201cif there is more to the official story than what they\u2019re telling us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tucker Carlson read Kirk\u2019s dispatch on his online show hosted on X, and several conservative outlets picked up the report.<\/p>\n
When asked about the reports, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department provided a statement that it \u201cwas notified that President Joe Biden was sick on July 17th during his visit to Las Vegas\u201d but were not informed of the nature of his illness. \u201cAs a precaution, LVMPD proactively began to shut down roads\u201d leading to the local hospital, before the Secret Service told the police that Biden was heading directly to the airport.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s clear that there was an undisclosed medical event on July 17th,\u201d Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Kirk, texted, citing the planned road closures and additional anonymous police sources from another journalist, but no medical evidence. After Kirk received a tip, he shared his information with his audience to try to get more detail, Kolvet added. \u201cJoe Biden either recovered quickly, or they\u2019re not telling us the entire story. It\u2019s also very curious that he dropped out of the race only four days later. We still have a lot of questions, but we followed a lead and have confirmed much of the original story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heading into the last months of the 2024 presidential campaign, which has been upended by extraordinary events including an assassination attempt on Trump and Biden\u2019s decision to step away from the race, researchers are girding for conspiracy theories to take root with every news event.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a common tactic to take a shred of information that\u2019s in the news and find a way to align it with an existing conspiratorial worldview, which in this case is that the Deep State and the current administration are out to get Trump,\u201d said Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She explained that conspiracy theories about Biden\u2019s ill health serve to demonstrate that the federal government is dishonestly propping up a Trump adversary in order to undermine the former president. \u201cMost of these theories are designed to position Trump as the hero of the story,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Some figures on the right attempted to tie the attempted assassination to Biden\u2019s stepping out of the race.<\/p>\n
\u201cBiden didn\u2019t drop out of the race until after the attempts to imprison and assassinate Donald Trump failed. Do you think that is coincidence?\u201d Sean Davis, co-founder and CEO of the conservative Federalist site, said in a post shared on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll political conspiracy theories seem to eventually converge,\u201d said Melissa Ryan, digital strategist at Card Strategies, where she specializes in studying online hate and conspiracy theories. She added that the close proximity in time between Trump\u2019s shooting and Biden\u2019s withdrawal made it easier for the conspiracy-minded to link the two events.<\/p>\n
But investigators have found no evidence connecting Biden or the Democratic Party to the gunman who attempted to kill Trump, nor have they identified a particular ideology or motive driving the shooter, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old killed at the scene. Crooks had searched online days earlier for information about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he used a rifle with a collapsible stock that may have made it easier for him to disguise the weapon before climbing onto a roof, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The current moment has brought conspiratorial thinking, which emerged on the fringes of politics during Trump\u2019s first term, into the center of a major-party platform, experts said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe issue isn\u2019t so much the theories themselves,\u201d said Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who specializes in conspiracy theories. \u201cThe issue is that you have Donald Trump and his allies in the conservative media and the government using a lot of conspiracy theories, and that\u2019s where it becomes a major problem, because they have political elites like presidential candidates and senators and representatives and cable news channels and internet personalities with big audiences \u2026 pushing this stuff to audiences who trust them. [And] that\u2019s really bad. And that\u2019s where we need to be focused.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Harris addressed the nation Tuesday from a suburb of Milwaukee in her first rally, Worldnet Daily, the far-right conspiracy theory publication that was a leading voice falsely claiming that former president Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., recirculated online posts about Biden stepping away from the race and asked, \u201cDid we just witness a coup?\u201d<\/p>\n
The inability to agree on a set of facts leads to the perception of an information vacuum, said Squire, such that even with more information, the vacuum never fills up. \u201cWhen you have a lack of information,\u201d she said, \u201cthe world we\u2019ve built is going to fill that with garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeremy Merrill contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When President Biden announced he was suspending his campaign for president, Donald Trump and some of his supporters stitched together a series of conspiracy theories about Biden\u2019s health, his motives for dropping out, and even whether he was still alive. Those false assertions built on years of reality-bending messages from Trump and others on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}