‘Page one of repressive playbook’: critics warn of Trump’s conspiratorial attacks

Since the start of his second presidency, Donald Trump has often launched outlandish conspiratorial attacks on critics and foes that mock them and label their views as hoaxes, prompting scholars and legal experts to say Trump’s attacks endanger US freedoms, public health and science.

Trump’s extensive use of conspiracy theories is the hallmark of an authoritarian leader that has weakened trust in the coming midterm elections, dangerously ignored scientific evidence, and often pushed for prosecutions of his political enemies in ways that seriously erode civil liberties, say critics.

Trump’s conspiratorial and authoritarian-style tactics are palpable say critics, in his false claim that the US faces a “crisis of election security” to bolster his radical push for new curbs on voting rights, and his labeling of climate change as a “hoax” despite extensive scientific evidence that it’s a reality.

To some scholars, Trump-backed conspiratorial claims have had a damaging impact on all levels of US society and democracy and are emblematic of how authoritarian leaders use conspiracies to justify repression.

Steven Levitsky, the Harvard professor of government and the co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Conspiracies are page one of the repressive playbook,” noting that Mao, Stalin, Putin and other authoritarian leaders have historically launched attacks on enemies by floating conspiracies.

“They’re almost always used to justify repression,” Levitsky added noting that authoritarian leaders can simply allege conspiracies without providing any or only minimal “evidence”.

In a notable twist, Trump charged in mid-September that some AI leaders and experts were engaging in a big “conspiracy” and perpetrating a “HOAX”, by urging strong safeguards to protect against potential extinction-level threats to humanity from this powerful new technology.

Similarly, Trump without evidence disparaged critics of datacenters as people who “want to end up being backwards and poor”, and asserted he was the best “guardrail” to protect society from threats that unregulated AI pose.

Scholars and former federal officials say that Trump’s tarring foes in conspiratorial attacks endangers democracy and recall the tactics of the infamous rightwing lawyer Roy Cohn, a key promoter of the “red scare” in the 1950s who Trump had close ties with in the 1980s during his early New York real estate career.

“Trump, mentored by Roy Cohn, learned that baseless allegations about shady forces working against him could serve to mobilize and lead the public to see him as a victim rather than a wrongdoer,” said the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “Whenever faced with criticism, such as from the media or about his AI policies, his instinct is to throw out charges of a vast conspiracy that is out to get him.”

Zelizer stressed: “Trump’s frequent use of conspiracies to attack critics has a damaging impact on all levels of society and democracy, from weakening confidence in elections to hurting our ability to deal with serious problems involving the AI industry.”

Trump’s penchant to paint critics in conspiratorial tones as dangerous enemies was palpable in his attacks last week on three news outlets – CNN, Politico and MS Now – barring them from White House access which prompted them to jointly file a lawsuit on 21 September challenging his moves on First Amendment and due process grounds.

In a Truth Social post on 21 September, Trump boasted that the White House “is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

A federal judge in DC ruled on 23 September that the administration should immediately return the press passes to the three outlets and its punitive action against them was probably unconstitutional.

Former federal prosecutor Ty Cobb who was a special counsel in the White House during Trump’s first term, warned that “Trump denies, denigrates and demeans his foes by painting them as part of a conspiracy … He resorts to abject fabrications in response to any criticism or resistance.”

This year Trump and his justice department have devoted sizable resources to bolster his conspiratorial claims that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud, and that the current voting system is riddled with fraud, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Trump has repeatedly pushed bogus claims laced with conspiracies as he did in a nationally televised speech on 16 July, when he urged tough new measures to curb voting by mail and investigate non-citizen voting ostensibly to make elections more secure.

In the TV speech, Trump made the factually inaccurate claim that non-citizen voting, which is illegal and historically negligible, poses a “crisis of election security”.

Trump’s obsession with painting non-citizen voting as a crisis is badly undercut by data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that cites just 100 cases over a 25-year period.

Critics see these moves by Trump to raise bogus fears about election safety and dark forces bent on voter fraud as a tool to “undermine public confidence” in the elections.

“It seems that the Trump administration is grooming the electorate to believe that the fall election will abound with fraud,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan.

“It is difficult to know if this effort is a pretext for seizing voting equipment, a strategy to intimidate some likely Democratic voters from showing up at the polls, or a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome, but all of it is harmful to democracy.”

On another front, Trump’s justice department has struggled for almost a year to find evidence to bring charges in an investigation looking at a “grand conspiracy” against Trump involving the so called “deep state” going back to President Barack Obama and inquiries into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. The investigation, which Trump has cheered on, has issued subpoenas to several former national security and law enforcement officials including ex-CIA director John Brennan and ex-FBI director James Comey.

This sprawling inquiry has tapped some key Trump-allied election denialists for top posts. Notably, Trump recruited 81-year-old Joe diGenova, a former prosecutor who led the effort until he abruptly announced his departure on 10 September, and ex-White House lawyer Kurt Olsen. Both lawyers had worked to discredit the 2020 election results and Joe Biden’s win.

The sudden move by diGenova to resign – after only five months on the job – raised questions about its direction and credibility. DiGenova’s departure followed that of another top prosecutor who was heading the investigation; Maria Medetis Long, a veteran national security prosecutor, resigned in April after reportedly voicing concerns about its direction.

“The so-called Grand Conspiracy investigation turns prosecutorial practice on its head,” said ex-justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich who has represented ex-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe in the inquiry.

“It starts with designated targets, the president’s perceived enemies, and then searches for facts and bends the law to support the theory. Joe diGenova found that it was easier to be an outside propagandist cheering the theory from the sidelines than have the responsibility to build such a case with actual facts.”

In other energy and environmental matters, Trump and his top officials have deployed bogus conspiracies and specious information to counter growing evidence of the risks posed by climate change from rising temperatures to dangerous storms worldwide.

The Trump administration has moved hard to kill energy and environmental regulations aimed at fighting climate change, and simultaneously have promoted greater usage of coal, which Trump has lauded erroneously as “clean and beautiful”, and other fossil fuels that worsen climate change.

Late last year, Trump energy officials issued emergency orders to keep open five ageing coal plants in Michigan and four other states that were scheduled to shut down, spurring some states to challenge the costly moves.

In mid-September, a federal judge ruled that the energy department had exceeded its authority by ordering the Michigan plant to stay open past its retirement.

Further, after years of conspiratorial attacks on wind energy by Trump, his administration in December announced it was pausing leases on five offshore wind projects on the east coast in a big blow to the industry.

The five windfarms were slated to power over 2.5m homes and create 10,000 jobs. A federal judge in February issued a preliminary injunction allowing one of the five to stay open.

“Trump’s decisions make no sense from either the perspective of environmental protection or the cost of energy,” Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University science historian and professor of earth and planetary sciences, told the Guardian earlier this year.

Oreskes added that “by blocking wind projects that [were] just about ready to go on line, and reviving dangerous and uneconomic coal-powered plants, this administration is raising both the direct costs of energy for the American people, and the indirect costs we suffer through polluted air and climate damage.”

Significantly, the Trump administration in February revoked a major scientific finding that climate change endangers public health, an idea that Trump has derided as “a scam”, despite numerous scientific studies saying it’s a well quantifiable harm.

Dr Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington told PBS: “It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing.”

In healthcare too, Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services (HHS) who has a long history of making factually erroneous claims about vaccine safety, have indulged in flawed and conspiratorial claims about vaccines.

Trump declared flatly in August that the combined MMR vaccine for children could be “quite lethal”, but failed to offer scientific evidence to back his claim. Trump too has advocated breaking up longstanding immunizations into three separate shots that currently are not available in the United States.

Even as the death toll from the worst outbreak of measles in decades rises, Kennedy on 16 September starred at a Washington DC conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he spearheaded for almost two decades.

“Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” Kennedy told the gathering in an almost 90-minute talk. “You have friends in the White House, and we are doing this one day at a time.”

According to recent polls about one-quarter of Americans now have doubts about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines in the wake of multi-year campaigns against immunizations by groups that once were fringe figures.

From a historical perspective, Zelizer noted that conspiracy theories in American politics have a long history, but that before Trump “the role of presidents and other high-level elected officials had been to push back against this part of politics, rather than to amplify these ideas.”