The End of our Conspiracy Theorist President

 Fortunately, as I write this, the election is over and it ended the way that it "should" have. Yet, there's a list of things that we are missing out on having dumped Trump from his office. I try not to be overtly political on this blog for a few reasons: the first being that it is tied to my course and there are certain lines that we are not supposed to cross when it comes to speech in class. We cannot tell our students who they ought to vote for, and I extend that to not telling them who I am voting for as well. 

The second is that political sides do not really matter when it comes to conspiracy theories. So if you are in the labour party in the UK, you might think that all of the conspiracy theories come from the Brexit party (I refuse to call it anything else) and British Trump (I refuse to call him anything else). You would be wrong though. Just as in my country one would be very tempted to think that every conspiracy theory comes from the Republican party and soon to be former president Trump. This however would be wrong. Conspiracy theories exist on both sides of the political spectrum getting more frequent and more intense the further one gets towards the extreme position. 

The president though, is a unique case. Typically conspiracy theories are about punching against the "powers that be." We have conspiracy theories about JFK that involve a shadow government, these almost always come from those that feel society is wronging them in some fashion. This would almost always mean that the conspiracy theories come from those out of power and are about those in power. 9/11 conspiracy theories began amongst left wing opponents to Bush as well as anti-government sovereign citizen types. The point is that they came from those out of power not the ones in charge, which is why the current (as of this writing) president, and his supporters, represent something of a mystery to me. 

Can you seriously argue that a mysterious "them" is keeping you from achieving your goals and thwarting all of your plans when you are the president of the goddamn United States of America. It's hard for me to sympathize and fortunately we have two examples from my lifetime of presidents complaining about a "they." The first would be GOP president Ronald Reagan (80-88) who complained of a "deep state." This wouldn't be the Illuminati or a secret cabal of democrats working against him, rather it was the sprawling government bureaucracy that made implementing new governmental regulations and laws difficult. It was a complaint against inefficiency that was not directed against any group of purposeful actors.  

The second is Democrat president Barak Obama. Obama complained that he was being stymied from implementing any policy, especially during his second term. Like Reagan, he wasn't lying or creating a conspiracy theory. The GOP congress explicitly said that they were going to stall any of his positions or policies with their control of the congress under the old rules. Again, like Reagan, the thing Obama was talking about was real and not even a conspiracy since it was out in the open. 

Trump, was different. From day one, he began complaining about the conspiracy which made it look like his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's. While his first campaign was based on building the wall, he claimed that there was a conspiracy against it. Obviously this was a deflection from his inability to garner any kind of political support for the idea, and let's be absolutely clear that the problem was him. The GOP controlled both houses of Congress, any bill that they wanted could have been easily slid through. He's been, in my opinion, the conspiracy theory president. Tweeting at anyone who would read his baseless and often crazy conspiracy theories. At a certain point, I began to doubt that he didn't believe them since they were so frequent. 

As the sun sets on his presidency, there are a few questions I would like answered.

1) Who really did knock down the twin towers? (he promised that we would find out if he was elected)

2) What is the real science of vaccines? (as he claimed that they caused autism and other health issues)

3) What did his private detectives find in Hawaii when investigating Obama's birth certificate? 

4) Is there a global satanic ring of pedophiles operating out of Washington DC?--Ok, he didn't create that last one but he is the center of it. 

*At least I am almost certain he popularized the term. 


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