News
Conrad Duncan
Aug 13, 2019
Late night TV host Seth Meyers has highlighted Donald Trump’s troubling history of spreading conspiracy theories.
On Saturday, Trump shared a video of an unfounded conspiracy theory accusing the Clintons of killing Jeffrey Epstein, prompting anger from politicians, journalists and FBI agents.
But that post was just one example in a long history of wildly inaccurate and baseless claims promoted by the president.
As Meyers explains, Trump kick-started his political career as a prominent promoter of a conspiracy which falsely claimed Barack Obama was not born in the USA.
Meyers begins the segment by saying:
Trump has changed many things in his life but there are a few constants. He’s always been a racist, he’s always been a con artist and he’s always been a conspiracy theorist.
Trump has paranoid fantasies about everything from climate change to government surveillance to the food he eats.
Meyers lists the following ridiculous theories...
- Trump's fear of being poisoned, according to the book Fire & Fury, which inspires him to eat at McDonalds because the food there is “safely premade”.
- His repeated claim, without evidence, that there has been illegal voting by millions of people - often undocumented immigrants in Trump's unfounded theory.
- His false suggestion that billionaire George Soros and the Democrats were funding migrants to come to the US border - a claim that he told reporters “a lot of people" were repeating.
- The previously-mentioned birthplace conspiracy about Obama, which Trump kept up for years without evidence.
Even when he was proven wrong about Obama’s birthplace – his birth certificate shows he was born in Hawaii – Trump tried to take credit for getting him to release it.
The president has also repeatedly pushed other conspiracy theories, as journalist Aaron Blake noted on Monday.
In short, Trump has consistently demonstrated that he has a poor understanding of fact and fiction, and often believes what he wants to read rather than what the evidence shows him.
His Epstein allegations are just another example in a long history of crackpot theories that have no basis in reality.
HT: HuffPost
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