I don’t watch much TV and had never seen an episode of The Apprentice. As a life-long southerner, the New York celebrity scene wasn’t of any interest. My very first time hearing Donald Trump was in 2011 on one of the morning TV shows and the topic was Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Trump was throwing out innuendo suggesting that Obama’s birth certificate, then not public, said he was a Muslim, never mind the fact that no US birth certificate has a child’s religion on it.
As the years went by, Donald Trump became a vector for a number of conspiracy theories, most notably 2020 election denial.
I spent thousands of hours online debunking conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, writing over 4,000 articles on the topic at my Obama Conspiracy Theories blog. This time around, I’m going to take the same approach, applying the same fact checking and debunking techniques to conspiracy theories about Donald Trump, starting with the 2024 US Presidential election. When I started on Obama I knew almost nothing about him. I had an open mind. Trump has accumulated a lot of baggage in my mind since 2011; I’ll have to be extra careful not to let my biases get in the way.
Bad News Sells
The infamous “mainstream media” has put out some pretty strong doomsday speculation about the upcoming Trump administration. Trump’s image wasn’t helped by the selection of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, perhaps the worst pick ever for that job, who was so bad he finally withdrew. So the political left will provide the grist for the Trump Conspiracy Theories mill.
Does he intend to use the Department of Justice against his political enemies? Will he wreck the economy with tariffs and mass unemployment after gutting the federal workforce? Is he in the tank for Vladimir Putin? Is Medicaid doomed? Will children starve without school lunches? After the election, will he play golf and let Elon Musk or JD Vance run the government?
As I said once before back in 2011:
Let the Claims Begin1
