Since returning to the White House for a second term, Donald Trump has turned the conspiracy theory into a governing instrument. There is a pattern to almost every controversy he faces: the facts are flipped, the critics are recast as part of a malevolent cabal, and the accusation itself becomes the story. Whether he is calling climate change a hoax, suggesting that artificial intelligence researchers are scheming to destroy humanity, or claiming that American elections are being stolen by hordes of non-citizen voters, Trump speaks as though the entire world is conspiring against him and his followers. To many supporters, this is simply Trump being Trump. But historians, legal scholars and former government officials see something more dangerous: the classic toolkit of authoritarian leaders. Steven Levitsky, the Harvard political scientist who co-wrote How Democracies Die, has noted that conspiracy theories are “page one of the repressive playbook.” Authoritarians from Stalin to Putin have used invented plots to justify crushing their enemies. The point is not to persuade the neutral; it is to mobilize your side, confuse the rest, and create license for retaliation. In the American context, this constant drumbeat of imagined conspiracies has a corroding effect. It convinces people that their political opponents are not just fellow citizens with different ideas but enemies plotting against the nation. It weakens the public’s confidence in elections, in science, in public health agencies and in the news media. And because the president of the United States has enormous power, these narratives are not idle talk. They are followed by executive orders, prosecutions, regulatory rollbacks and barred press credentials. The result, critics say, threatens the basic architecture of American freedoms.
One of the clearest examples is Trump’s campaign to convince Americans that the electoral system is riddled with fraud. This is not a new obsession. Since losing the 2020 election, he has refused to accept the result, and in a nationally televised speech in July he again insisted that the country faces a “crisis of election security.” He called for tough new measures to curb voting by mail and to investigate non-citizen voting, even though non-citizen voting is illegal, extremely rare, and historically negligible. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which tracks election fraud cases, found just over 100 instances of non-citizen voting over a 25-year period. That is a statistical speck, not a crisis. Yet Trump keeps raising the alarm, and his administration has poured resources into hunting for fraud that election officials say does not exist in any meaningful quantity. Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, points out that this cannot be understood as a good-faith effort at election integrity. It may be a pretext for seizing voting equipment, a strategy to intimidate likely Democratic voters, or a way to pre-emptively delegitimize an unfavorable result. Whatever the motive, she says, all of it is harmful to democracy. The human cost is real: voters go to the polls with the sense that their ballots may not count, election workers face harassment and threats, and a broad segment of the public begins to doubt the very mechanism by which Americans choose their leaders. When the president constantly tells people that dark forces are rigging elections, he is teaching them that democracy itself is a sham. Historically, that is exactly the kind of message that makes citizens willing to abandon democratic norms and accept authoritarian substitutes.
Trump’s conspiratorial instinct has also turned on the world of technology. In mid-September, he charged that some artificial intelligence leaders and experts were engaging in a big “conspiracy” and perpetrating a “hoax” by urging strong safeguards against the potential risks of powerful new AI systems. Without evidence, he dismissed critics of datacenters as people who “want to end up being backwards and poor,” and then presented himself as the best possible “guardrail” to protect society. That kind of self-serving claim has deep roots in Trump’s formation. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian, notes that Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, the notorious rightwing lawyer who helped fuel the anti-communist red scare in the 1950s. From Cohn, Trump learned that baseless allegations about shadowy forces working against him could make him look like a victim rather than a wrongdoer. Whenever he faces criticism, Zelizer says, his instinct is to throw out charges of a vast conspiracy. That approach has poisoned public debate and made it harder to address serious problems, including the rapid growth of AI. But Trump has not stopped at rhetoric. In the same spirit, he barred three news organizations — CNN, Politico and MSNBC — from White House access, accusing the press of being corrupt, purposefully pervasive and fully coordinated, and even calling the news media a threat to national security. The three outlets sued, and a federal judge in Washington ruled that the administration’s punitive action was probably unconstitutional and ordered the press passes returned. Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who served as a special counsel in Trump’s first-term White House, describes the strategy bluntly: Trump denies, denigrates and demeans his foes by painting them as part of a conspiracy, and he resorts to outright fabrications at the first sign of criticism. When a president treats the press as an enemy of the state, the danger is not just to journalists. It is to ordinary citizens, who rely on independent information to make choices, hold power accountable and defend themselves against misinformation.
Perhaps the most troubling expression of this conspiratorial worldview is unfolding inside the U.S. Justice Department. Trump has encouraged an investigation into what he describes as a “grand conspiracy” against him, allegedly engineered by the so-called deep state during the Obama administration and during the inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The investigation has issued subpoenas to former national security and law enforcement officials, including former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. To lead the effort, Trump initially turned to Joe diGenova, an 81-year-old former prosecutor and fierce election-denier, who abruptly resigned in September after only five months on the job. Before him, a veteran national security prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, resigned in April after reportedly raising concerns about the direction of the investigation. Michael Bromwich, who served as the Justice Department’s inspector general and has represented former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe in the inquiry, describes what is happening in stark terms. He says the so-called grand conspiracy investigation turns prosecutorial practice upside down. It starts with designated targets, including the president’s perceived enemies, and then searches for facts and stretches the law to fit the theory. DiGenova, he observed, probably found it easier to be an outside propagandist cheering on the theory from a distance than to be responsible for building a real case with actual facts. In a healthy legal system, investigators start with evidence and then decide whether a crime occurred. Here, the conclusion appears to have come first, and the machinery of federal law enforcement is being used to chase it. That is not how justice is supposed to work, and the consequences go beyond any single case. When the Justice Department appears to be an extension of the president’s personal grievances, public trust in the rule of law collapses. People begin to see prosecutions as just another weapon in an endless political war, and that makes it far easier for abuses to go unnoticed or unchallenged.
Nowhere are the consequences of Trump’s conspiratorial style more visceral than in the fight over climate change and energy. Trump has long called climate change a hoax, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that it is real, dangerous and driven by human activity. His administration has aggressively dismantled environmental and energy regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it has pushed to keep coal plants running even when they are old, expensive and dirty. Late last year, the Energy Department issued emergency orders to keep five aging coal plants open in Michigan and four other states that were scheduled to shut down. Federal judges have ruled against some of these moves, saying the administration exceeded its authority. At the same time, Trump has waged war on wind energy. His administration paused leases on five offshore wind projects on the East Coast, a decision that would have supplied power to more than 2.5 million homes and created about 10,000 jobs. A federal judge later issued an injunction allowing at least one of those projects to continue. Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes has said that Trump’s decisions make no sense from the perspective of either environmental protection or energy costs. By blocking wind projects that were nearly ready to operate and reviving dangerous, uneconomic coal plants, the administration is raising direct energy costs for American families while increasing the hidden costs of polluted air and climate damage. In February, the administration went even further, revoking a scientific finding that climate change endangers public health, a conclusion that Trump has derided as a scam. Dr. Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington, called the move mind-boggling, saying it was akin to insisting the world is flat or denying that gravity exists. In human terms, this means more asthma attacks, more extreme heat, more destructive storms, higher insurance premiums, and a more unstable world for children and grandchildren. Conspiracy theories are not abstract mental exercises; they have consequences in the form of breathing harder in a smokier sky, watching familiar towns burn or drown, and knowing that the people in power are refusing to acknowledge what is happening.
Finally, there is public health, where Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his secretary of health and human services, have pushed dangerous and conspiratorial claims about vaccines. Kennedy has a long history of making false statements about vaccine safety, and he has helped turn the once-marginal anti-vaccine movement into a force with real influence in the federal government. In August, Trump declared without evidence that the combined MMR vaccine for children could be “quite lethal,” and he suggested breaking the shot into three separate immunizations, a version that is not even available in the United States. This comes as the country is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in decades, with preventable illnesses and deaths rising. In mid-September, Kennedy spoke at a conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly two decades, and assured the crowd that they had strong and steadfast friends in the White House. Polls indicate that roughly one in four Americans now has doubts about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, a dramatic erosion of confidence in one of the safest and most successful medical breakthroughs in history. The toll of this skepticism is not abstract: measles can cause pneumonia, brain swelling, permanent hearing loss and death, especially in children. When leaders give conspiratorial narratives a platform, they are playing with human lives. Zelizer, the Princeton historian, reminds us that conspiracy theories have always existed in American politics, but that presidents and high-level elected officials once saw it as their job to push back against those ideas rather than amplify them. Trump has reversed that expectation. He does not treat conspiracy theories as a problem to be solved; he treats them as tools to be used. And that, perhaps, is the deepest danger. In a democracy, trust is the currency of governance. Trust in elections, in science, in public health, in the justice system and in the press is what allows people who disagree with one another to still share a country. A president who constantly tells his followers that all of those institutions are corrupt, that all evidence is fake, and that all opponents are traitors may gain short-term political advantage, but he leaves behind a society that no longer knows what to believe. When nothing is true, everything becomes possible, and that is the point at which freedom begins to slip away.