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This is perhaps meant to explore how unusual it is to have a presidential candidate who willingly promotes crackpot conspiracy theories, but it could just as easily be read as an exploration of just how divorced from reality the entire conservative movement has become. Donald Trump is leading the polls in large part because of these things, not in spite of them.
[Donald Trump] has declared on a presidential debate stage that he knew a 2-year-old who immediately developed autism from a vaccination. He has appeared on the radio show of the noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has suggested that the government played a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. He has said on Twitter that President Obama might have attended Justice Scalia’s funeral had it been held at a mosque, feeding into the pervasive rumor that the Christian president is actually a Muslim. And he shared with a rally crowd a dramatic story of a United States general executing Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, which has been dismissed as an Internet rumor.
The vaccination claims are run-of-the-mill, cribbed from lesser Republican voices like Michele Bachmann. Alex Jones is an all-around lunatic who has made considerable inroads into the conservative id these last few years, perhaps because of his insistence that any and all acts of world violence are all calculated plots to Take Our Guns. The Scalia rumor-mongering was rampant in the days after his death, since no true patriot could quite accept that an overweight 79-year-old man with anger issues and a stressful but sedentary job might keel over dead for reasons other than conspiratorial mischief. There's been a gun-toter's company actually selling the "bullets dipped in pigs blood" to fellow patriots as a fun gift to give your Muslim-hating uncle for his birthday. And the theory that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim is, in conservative circles, absolutely pervasive.
Donald Trump invented none of these things, in other words. They were all invented in conservative circles, worked their way up to actual Republican elected officials (who, let us remind ourselves, are still busying themselves with similarly conspiratorial notions involving "Agenda 21," the plot to take away all our golf courses and force Americans to ride bikes to work, or "Jade Helm", the Obama plot to take over Texas and place it under American rule—a plan that would no doubt have worked, had Texas Gov. Abbott not marshaled his own troops to keep tabs on the crafty Americans. And let us not forget creeping sharia, the omnipresent notion that Muslims are going to take over the country and turn it all Muslim unless all the dumbest Republican legislators in the nation gather together and pass laws saying that they're not allowed to do such a thing.
If anything, Donald Trump is a shameless hanger-on. It is absolutely true that his current rise in Republican circles can be attributed to his own public embrace of that granddaddy of all "serious" conservative conspiracy theories, the notion that the sitting president was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya and since the very day of his birth dark forces have meddled with the Hawaiian records in order to cover up the malevolent truth—but Trump didn't invent that. He came into birtherism relatively late in the game, after actual dumbshit—sorry, after actual sitting Republican congressmen—nodded their heads at the theory themselves.
It's the conservative base's recent embrace of every possible conspiracy theory that gave rise to Donald Trump, not the other way around. Donald Trump just repeats what he sees, and he only sees these things after some rube at Breitbart "News" gets a hot tip from his neighborhood oxycontin supplier and writes it up, providing something for the brain trust at Fox & Friends to fill time with for a day. The entirety of the Benghazi! clown show has been predicated on there being a "conspiracy" by a malevolent White House to something something something, where the something something something has even these years later never quite been sussed out.
And surely we cannot forget the advocacy group ACORN was intentionally destroyed by what turned out to be false accusations peddled by a strident faker. Or the countless other fake-tape "scandals" that have become the bread and butter of conservative "journalism," a conspiracy-peddling machine that just happens to target whatever bogeyman conservatives are most apoplectic about with news-friendly "footage" pieced together in order to "prove" a claim that invariably turns out to be debunked later, but which still manages to be repeated on Republican presidential debate stages and on the floor of the House and Senate.
Yes, Donald Trump is a bit of a lunatic who believes a lot of contradictory, conspiratorial things—or at least says he does, if they're things that have already been going around a bit and they happen to land in his inbox. But that's one of the precise reasons he's doing so well with the base. They believe there are multiple—perhaps uncountable—conspiracies against them, conspiracies by the Muslims, and the Mexicans, and the people who speak languages other than English, and the gay Americans, and China, and their own government leaders, even the Republican ones, all of them conspiring to screw John Q. Public via a program of diversity and science and book-learning and God knows what else.
What can we say? For a Republican base primed by Fox News to be ever-paranoid and forever gullible, he is the candidate that all of these paranoid and deeply angry people have been waiting for. Finally, a politician who will acknowledge all their deepest primal fears—even the ones that aren't the least bit true. Now that's the sort of leadership they've been waiting for.