A Conspiracy Theory to out-trump Trump
by Professor John Kane
Speculation is rife that Donald Trump — after a few weeks of outrage remarkable even by his standards — may have peaked in his bid for the presidency and is now in terminal decline.
To recall, Trump:
- insulted the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, after they spoke against him at the Democratic Convention;
- belatedly endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan while praising Ryan’s opponent in the Wisconsin primary;
- seemed at a rally to advocate violence by ‘second-amendment folks’ against Hillary Clinton;
- claimed (and later repeated that he meant this literally) that Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary were co-founders of Islamic State.
With Republicans — in disarray approaching despair and awaiting the hoped-for pivot to a more presidential style — some ‘establishment’ Republicans have declared they will not vote for Trump and may even vote for Clinton. Additionally, some major donors are shifting funds toward the Democrats. ‘Teflon Trump’ seems to have turned decidedly sticky.
A turning of the tide seems confirmed in polls that show Clinton with a small-to-moderate lead nearly everywhere, including level pegging in Texas. The New York Times recently estimated Hillary’s chance of gaining the White House at around 88%.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates for the House and the Senate are distancing themselves from their toxic standard-bearer and encouraging split-ticket voting in the upcoming elections — a highly unusual occurrence given the phenomenon of presidential ‘coat-tails’.
Judged by any normal standard, all of this would indicate that the Donald’s tilt at history is over, his campaign doomed. These are, of course, not normal times.
Trump has survived, even thrived upon, statements, calumnies and affronts to truth that would have proved disastrous for any candidate in normal times. Anyone who bet heavily against his getting this far in the race must surely have lost their shirts by now.
This fact gives hardened commentators pause when it comes to declaring him positively done, yet they know there are such things as tipping-points in nature and history and cannot be sure that Trump has not reached his.
Perhaps the Trump phenomenon is, after all, no more than a bubble inflated by his own gargantuan ego amid conditions of Republican decline and national malaise, but a bubble nevertheless that must inevitably pop under pressure of hard reality.
What is hardest to comprehend, however, is that Trump seems to display little or no awareness that his own actions and utterances may provide the fatal pinprick. He understands and connects with a fanatical base of supporters who lustily cheer his every barbarity (and indeed many of his most outrageous comments are commonplaces among this group of American society).
Yet he must know — surely does know — that he must expand his appeal beyond this minority to connect with broader middle-America if he is to have a hope of winning in November (which has always been a very long-shot). He seems to believe that the strategy of ‘plain-talking’ that has taken him so far should be relied upon to get him further still, and so ignores the advice of expert advisers to moderate his tone and style.
Perhaps he reasons that his métier is simply that of the barnstorming showman with a penchant for hyperbole and that he cannot readily change or, in reality, change at all. Perhaps.
And yet the impression of deep irrationality in this attitude is puzzling. Here is a man who, in abnormal times and against an unpopular opponent, has (or maybe had) a genuine shot at the presidency of the United States. Why would he not capitalise on his momentum and his advantage as a political outsider to work more consciously and strategically on the widespread disillusionment of Americans with their politicians and their whole political system? One begins to wonder if the man really cares at all.
Maybe he does, only not about being president.
Conspiracies?
Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote that Donald, if he were deliberately trying to avoid winning the election, could hardly have done a better job. But surely that’s the clue. In a mad, mad world the maddest explanation may be the correct one. Trump is a well-known fan and purveyor of conspiracy theories. Obama as founder of ISIS is merely the most recent one, built on an earlier claim, following the June massacre in an Orlando nightclub, that Obama was ‘sympathetic’ to terror groups.
Trump was a vocal proponent of the ‘birther’ campaign that claimed Obama was not born a citizen of the US and was thus ineligible for the presidency. In his primary contest with Ted Cruz, he suggested that Cruz’s father, Rafael, was suspiciously associated with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just before the latter’s murder. The list could be indefinitely extended.
Add this to the fact that Trump is on record as praising Hillary in the past — a fact used against him by his rivals in the primaries and lately by Hillary’s campaign — for example:
“Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman”; “I know her very well, and I know her husband very well, and I like them both”; “Hillary is smart, tough, and a very nice person”; “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president”.
Even for an amateur conspiracy theorist the conclusion is obvious. Conspiracy-lover Donald Trump is perpetrating one of the greatest conspiracies of modern times to get Hillary into the White House. Hillary, given her perceived vulnerabilities — a penumbra of mistrust created by a combination of Republican attacks, her own email mis-steps, her ‘establishment’ position in an anti-establishment era, and her undeniable ties to Wall Street which alienated her even from the left-wing of her own party — could not be a certainty in her bid for the presidency. Only the elimination of any credible Republican rival could reasonably assure victory. This was Trump’s task.
The terminal state of the Republican Party was his opportunity. Fourteen other primary candidates of various standing and credibility proved no match for an unorthodox candidate who mercilessly exposed their weaknesses, prevarications and ‘out-of-touchness’ with contemporary grass-roots America.
If Trump had to drive a final nail into the Republican coffin to give Hillary a clear run then he would do so, and he unrepentantly did. With the fourteen vanquished, only one plausible threat to Hillary remained, Trump himself, and he would eliminate that one just as surely and efficiently as all the others by escalating his outrageousness to heights that only the lunatic fringe could overlook or forgive.
The beauty of, and difficulty with, conspiracy theories is that they are constructed so as to deploy available evidence in a way that points with at least superficial plausibility to a desired conclusion. Why certain conclusions are desired by certain people is of course a central question, but this partiality makes conspiracy theories forever resistant to contradictory evidence (the promulgation of which is inevitably interpreted as part of the general conspiracy).
The logic of a conspiracy
I have presented the logic of a Trump conspiracy that accommodates the known facts, but the question must arise of who Donald is conspiring with, and who is the audience for such a conspiracy theory should it take hold.
But the genius of the Donald conspiracy — if there is one — is that he is conspiring (if we cannot contemplate Hillary’s involvement) with no one but himself. Moreover any potential audience for this theory has been purposely occluded by Donald himself. Trump presents himself as a victim of conspiracies — the Republican primary system was stacked against him, the entire US electoral system is designed to prevent his access to the White House — which obscures the possibility that he might be the originator of one.
Politics being politics, genuine conspiracies occur, a fact that lends the mass of conspiracy theories their power to persuade the gullible. The best conspiracies, however, may be the ones that are never suspected. Perhaps Trump is willing to accept his characterisation as an irrational, narcissistic, power-hungry clown as the price of getting Hillary elected, thus saving America and the world from another disastrous Republican administration. Perhaps this marks the selfless sacrifice of a true patriot.
The only alternative, given the evidence, is that he is an irrational, narcissistic, power-hungry clown with no clear path to the presidency and no coherent program should he get there. We must take our pick.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and is now Professor in the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University.
John teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy and is a researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and four times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with H. Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
