A few weeks before the United States’ presidential elections, Donald Trump accuses attempts of a ‘coup d’état’ and speaks of ‘men in black’ and ‘dark shadows.’
UNITED STATES. (AFP) – Eight weeks before the United States elections, President Donald Trump rushes into an abyss of conspiracy theories, talking about saboteurs dressed in black, “dark shadows,” and calling himself a victim of a coup d’état and distorted surveys.
The latest story of the Republican, a candidate for a new term in the November 3 presidential elections, is that a plane loaded with agitators was deployed to disrupt his party’s convention in Washington last week.
“Someone got on a plane from a certain city, and the plane was almost completely loaded with thugs in those dark uniforms, black uniforms, with things and this and that,” he told Fox News on Monday.
On Tuesday, he told reporters about a “whole plane full of looters and anarchists and troublemakers.” The president maliciously said, “I’ll see if I can get you that information.” He never did.
But clear similarities became evident between Trump’s plot and a conspiracy theory circulating on Facebook earlier this summer about leftist airborne provocateurs, leading the U.S. media to ask him if that was his supposed secret source.
In the same interview for Fox, Trump said that former Vice President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival in the race and leads many of the polls, is a puppet controlled by “people you’ve never heard of, people who are in the dark shadows.”
“It sounds like a conspiracy theory,” said Fox’s interviewer Laura Ingraham. “These are people you haven’t heard of,” Trump repeated.
TRUMPED ELECTIONS
The “men in black” and the “mysterious occult forces” are just two threads in a great tapestry that Trump uses to describe his presidency as besieged by an unidentifiable “deep state” that seeks to ruin his first term and fix the election to ensure he doesn’t get the second.
The president caricatures official investigations into his relations with Russia – a country that has been singled out by U.S. intelligence services repeatedly for interfering in the 2016 election to increase Trump’s chances – as a “hoax” and a “coup.”
And almost daily, the Republican claims that the potential increase in absentee voting in November due to the coronavirus pandemic is a tactic to “rig” the election against him.
The magnitude of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims is not far from the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, which went viral and has been dormant since the beginning of his presidency.
QAnon claims that a high-level anonymous government informant code-named “Q” is working heroically to expose an anti-Trump conspiracy, which in some ways would also be running an international satanic pedophile network that traffics children and controls the world.
Q has a growing following both online and in real life, even among audiences who come out to cheer Trump on at rallies or other events. A QAnon Republican believer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is on track to be elected to the House of Representatives.
Trump, who effusively congratulated Greene, is doing nothing to quell Q fever. “She’s gaining popularity,” Trump said with approval last month. “They like me a lot.”
Rich Hanley, a professor in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, Northeast, says that Trump reflects – and benefits from – a society increasingly lost in the smoke and mirrors of the Internet. “It may be an atypical among presidents, but not among the growing number of Americans who love conspiracy theories,” Hanley said.
And with the possibility of presidential election results coming out only days after polls close due to increased use of absentee voting, paranoia and rumors could reach an all-time high.
“It will be the Woodstock of conspiracy theories no matter who wins because this kind of fiction is now deeply rooted in millions of people’s alternative reality,” Hanley said.
