Trump’s conspiracy theories are coming at him 'from all quarters': report

President Donald Trump’s conspiracy leopards are “eating” his face, said Bulwark Senior reporter Will Sommer, and we can’t be surprised.

Trump is an Obama “birther” who spent his career lobbing conspiracy theories. His willingness to glom onto and encourage conspiracies heartened a horde of so-called truth-seekers who were thrilled to have their nutty opinions validated by an elected official in the White House.

His rabid base is now hungry for the Epstein files, which for years they had been told was filled with indictments of Democrats. But then they saw Trump fight the Epstein discharge petition, and attack petition cosponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) for his recent remarriage.

This, said Sommer, was “an especially bizarre criticism coming from Trump, of all people — as more proof that this presidency is not going well.”

“But the Epstein theory is not just a singularly hard crisis for this White House to navigate,” Sommer added. “It’s symptomatic of a larger problem vexing the administration. The president is being undermined by conspiracy theories from all quarters, including ones who are far crazier than those having to do with Epstein.”

Sommer said the recent flare-up on the right over the online activity of Thomas Crooks, who attempted to kill Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, is just one example. Republicans were furious at the FBI’s inability to uncover Crooks’ liberal online profile, which would have buttressed their theory of an “organized leftist network.”

“The frustration crested this past week as Tucker Carlson accused law enforcement agencies of systemically covering up, or outright lying to the public about, Crooks’s background,” writes Sommer.

The anger grew so intense that Kash Patel’s FBI launched a ‘rapid response’ account on X, rebut Carlson. Patel even had to assure on X that the FBI was taking the investigation into Crooks seriously.

“But as is often the case with conspiracists, a direct attack on a load-bearing belief is not necessarily going to convince proponents that the belief is wrong,” said Sommer. “On Benny Johnson’s show, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) argued that Crooks was likely ‘groomed’ as part of some CIA mind-control experiment.”

The conspiracy network swung into action when Carlson unveiled what he purported were copies of some of Crooks’s online profiles with the New York Post and InfoWars personality Breanna Morello broadcasting Carlson’s theories.

“The reporting appears to be mostly nonsense,” said Sommer, suggesting that people who dress up as animals are out to kill Trump supporters. But then Megyn Kelly further complicated things by claiming Monday that the furry theory was just an FBI-plant to obscure Carlson’s suggestions that the shooter was recruited by shadowy forces.

But what do you expect, said Sommer. “Many of the conspiracies that contributed to Trump’s rise to power involved accusations that the justice system had been weaponized against him and promises that justice for these offenses would not be delayed much longer.”

Other conspiracies fluttering around, said Sommer, include the one from the conservative “Blaze” claiming to have broken open the suggestion that a former Capitol Police officer had planted the pipe bombs at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the Republicans’ Capitol Hill Club on January 6th. It was flimsy, of course, said Sommer, and now the site may “soon be staring down a massive lawsuit,” said Sommer.

Despite its gooey foundation, Sommer said FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino “scrambled to investigate the accusation anyway,” eventually writing on X that the Blaze story had inspired “a week of near 24-hour work” that revealed the argument to be “grossly inaccurate.”

Read the Bulwark report at this link.