[NEWSWEEK] President Donald J. Trump loves a good conspiracy theory. He spent much of Barack Obama’s eight years in office suggesting that the president had been born outside the United States. That claim, with its obvious racial overtones, raised Trump’s profile with the nativist wing of the Republican Party, giving him the necessary credibility to launch a presidential campaign in 2015.
During the Republican presidential primary, he suggested that the father of Senator Ted R. Cruz, the Republican from Texas, was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Later yet, after his Republican foes had been vanquished, he charged that his general election opponent, Hillary Clinton, "meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors."
The statement suggested a fickle affinity for conspiracy theories that would be difficult for a 71-year-old to temper, even if his newfound political power may have called for a more restrained approach to unsubstantiated innuendo. Trump has carried the conspiratorial mind-set into the Oval Office, tweeting about illegal Obama wiretaps of Trump Tower and worrying about Deep State coups against his administration.
Yes, yes, yes of course Newsweek columnists, Trump is absolutely insane. |