While Donald Trump remains a dominant force in American politics, his presidency is history. It is time to assess its profound impact, particularly on the role of conspiracy theory.
The “after” in my title is not merely temporal; it also signifies “according to” Trump—tracing how his authority has reshaped conspiracy theory’s function in American political culture, especially within the Republican Party.
Donald Trump fundamentally changed the role of conspiracy theories in American politics.
To understand this shift, we must look to the past. For centuries, conspiracy theories were mainstream, orthodox knowledge.
The Republican Party itself was founded on the “Slave Power” conspiracy theory, which cast southern slaveholders as a cabal controlling the government and helped precipitate the Civil War.
Similarly, the mid-20th-century Red Scare, a fear of communist infiltration, was a consensus belief, not a fringe view.
This changed in the 1950s and 60s. Social scientists and intellectuals, reacting to the horrors of Nazism and McCarthyism, successfully stigmatized conspiracy theory as irrational and dangerous fringe thinking. Conspiracist knowledge was relegated to the margins, thriving in isolated subcultures.
While theories occasionally surfaced in official discourse (e.g., Reagan on Soviet-controlled terrorism, Bush on WMDs in Iraq), they had to be veiled and were quickly met with criticism.
The internet made these theories more visible, transforming stigmatized subcultures into what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics.” Yet, they remained largely illegitimate in mainstream discourse.
This changed with the rise of Barack Obama and the birther movement, which saw a major conspiracy theory gain traction on the right-wing airwaves of Fox News, beginning its re-legitimization.
Donald Trump masterfully capitalized on this. His political ascent was launched with birtherism, and his 2016 campaign employed a strategic rhetoric of conspiracy—using phrases like “a lot of people are saying” to signal allegiance to conspiracists without alienating mainstream Republicans. He appealed to multiple publics simultaneously.
This calculus shifted when he faced defeat. In 2016, a desperate Trump articulated a detailed conspiracy against Hillary Clinton to mobilize his base.
In 2020, his loss to Joe Biden prompted an even more audacious move: a full-blown conspiracy theory of a “stolen election.” This time, his aim was not just to mobilize but to overturn the result.
While this theory failed in the courts—the “strong public” of the legal system rejected its logic—it succeeded spectacularly in the court of public opinion.
It was embraced and amplified by a conservative media ecosystem and, crucially, by the Republican Party itself. The result was the January 6th insurrection, a direct product of conspiracist belief.
The most dangerous legacy is not the violence of that day, but what followed. The Republican Party has not just tolerated Trump’s election fraud narrative; it has adopted the lie as a new founding ideology.
Republican officials who resisted have been purged, and those who promote the theory are rewarded. The conspiracy is now used proactively to justify voting restrictions and lay the groundwork to challenge future elections.
The most important consequence is that the Republican Party, instead of rejecting this theory, has adopted it as a core belief. The GOP is now using a blatantly false conspiracy theory to justify changing election laws and challenging future results. In short, a conspiracy theory has moved from the fringe to the center of power for one of the two major political parties, which the author sees as a serious threat to American democracy.
We now have two fragmented public spheres: one where conspiracy theory remains stigmatized, and another where it functions as orthodox, mobilizing knowledge. This fragmentation makes democracy unworkable.
While Europe fears following America’s path, the more apt comparison is to illiberal democracies like Hungary, where a ruling party uses state-controlled media and conspiracy theories to maintain power. The U.S. system, with its built-in biases like the Electoral College, is already vulnerable.
The Republican Party, armed with a conspiratorial worldview and the power to change election laws, is leveraging this theory not just to win votes, but to change the rules of the game itself.
The threat is no longer just a candidate’s rhetoric; it is the integration of conspiracy theory into the machinery of a major political party, making a worldview based on fantasy a clear and present danger to American democracy.
This is not the America that most Americans want to live in, but it is what 110 million people voted for when they let their vexation with President Joe Biden’s do-nothing Democrats compel them to stay home in the 2024 election, leaving 77,302,580 ballots cast for Trump and only 77,302,580 for Vice President Kamala Harris.
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