U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS_Nathan Howard
Since the death of President Donald Trump’s close political ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), influencers from the far right have spread conspiracy theories that the former moderate’s passing may have been an assassination. Even as Democrats by and large have attempted to express traditional condolences, conservatives have waded into the realm of baseless speculation.
Speaking with MS NOW anchor Katy Tur on Tuesday, two DC insiders argue that Trump himself is to blame for this pattern.
“I would humbly put some of the blame on Donald Trump, because conspiracy theories have never been more rampant,” Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich told Tur. “I mean, it sort of merges perfectly with social media, the internet and a lot of people that advise him — whether it's Laura Loomer or whether it's, you know, any number of people in the MAGA media world. Of course, no one can just die anymore. I mean, whether it's Lindsey Graham or, you know, around Mitch McConnell's sort of recent illness — there was all this speculation around keeping him alive or not, and so forth.” He added that Trump was offering groundless theories about prominent deaths all the way back in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly passed away.
At that point Tur played a clip of Trump describing Graham’s death by saying “a certain part of his body literally blew up” and asked about the meaning of that “grotesque way” of describing his death. At that point Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project, compared Trump’s statements about Graham to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) speculating that a photograph offered as proof of life for long-missing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) could be fraudulent.
“The conspiracy theory world is woven so tightly into MAGA and into Trump's entire political communication structure that — you know, it's ironic — you have Donald Trump on Newsmax being the adult in the room, while Laura Loomer and all these other folks are out there running around talking about Iranian hit squads taking out Lindsey Graham,” Wilson said.
He added, “I think the whole thing redounds back to Trump, though, because he has encouraged conspiracy theory stuff from the very start of his first campaign in 2015, and all of it has infused the party because it's good for clicks, it's good for distraction. And I think there are a lot of people around Trump — maybe not the president himself — who would much rather have people talking about a conspiracy theory than how disastrously wrong the Iran war has gone, or how disastrously wrong most of Donald Trump's economic policies have gone. I think they would much rather feed the beast with a lot of conspiracy twaddle than actually go out [and address it].”
Wilson concluded: “So they're opportunists.”
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