when conspiracy takes hold in the presidential campaign

Conspiracy theories are what Donald Trump supporters live for. Despite their candidate’s fake news, they seem to prefer this alternative truth defended by the ex-president, where Kamala Harris would use the immigrant vote to rig the election, or that the deep state would have attempted to assassinate by twice their candidate.

After 2016, then 2020, part of the American electorate slipped towards unabashed conspiracyism. Their new target: Kamala Harris. US Senator JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said during a rally on September 5 that Democrats support electoral fraud: they want illegal immigrants “steal everyone’s vote”. One of their flagship arguments: the Democrats would seek to get people who do not have American nationality to vote. Except that foreigners do not have the right to vote in federal elections or in presidential elections. As Rudy Reichstadt points out, immigration is used as a weapon to “to fake” and therefore “fly” the election.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to claim without evidence on his Truth Social network that the Democratic Party is incentivizing migrants to enter illegally in order to get them to vote for Kamala Harris.
For Tristan Mendès France, anti-migrant speeches have real-world consequences: closures of hospitals following threats of bomb attacks, of a campus following threats of armed attacks against Haitians in a university, evacuation of Springfield town hall following bomb threats…

“Was the one who tried to assassinate Trump a CIA agent?” A conspiratorial Internet user returns to this assassination attempt on the former president on September 15. Ryan Routh, 58, was arrested September 15 while fleeing after being spotted by Secret Service agents lying in wait in a bush with a semi-automatic rifle near the golf course where the former president. Before him, it was Thomas Crooks, 20, from Pennsylvania, who attempted to assassinate the former Republican president and presidential candidate. The latter was injured in the right ear and evacuated in the middle of a meeting in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday July 13.

According to Rudy Reichstadt, “This conspiracy theory is part of a long history of conspiracy theories about successful and failed assassination attempts against presidents in the United States.”

“By analogy, we explain that Thomas Crooks experienced the same fate as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, the first thing to note is that in the entire history of American presidential attacks, there has never been There has been only one case where more than one shooter shot the president.”

Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch

Complorama

“This is the reason why the attack of July 13, 2024 is probably not a plot but, as often, a personal initiative”continues the director of the Conspiracy Watch site.

After this event, Donald Trump will be presented as a martyr. “In the second case, the one involving Ryan Routh, we are in a very different configurationcontinues Rudy Reichstadt. Where Thomas Crooks was shot, Ryan Routh was arrested for him. Finally, the most important thing, where Ryan Routh did not even use his weapon (…), Thomas Crooks had time to fire eight shots and kill one of the spectators. When it comes to the July 13 attack, Trump is truly a miracle.”

Some of the conspiracy theories linked to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump come from Internet users who claim to be “liberal” and progressive. The American media, including the Washington Post, are even talking about a “BlueAnon”, a Democratic tendency towards conspiracy theorist. But for Tristan Mendès France, “the fact that Democrats indulge in this type of theory is above all a symptom of the decline in the quality of information consumption in the United States (…) On the Democratic side, we have no candidate which fuels and legitimizes these theories among its voters”. Rudy Reichstadt assures us: “There is no common measure or symmetry between what the media have called the BlueAnon, by analogy with QAnon, and QAnon which is a real, structured movement which irrigates a very large part of Trump’s sympathizers. And above all, Trump willingly plays it”.

During the debate with Kamala Harris on the ABC television channel on September 10, the former president claimed that Democrats pay people to attend Kamala Harris’ rallies. “It’s obviously false,” replies Rudy Reichstadt, who sees it as “narcissistic” conspiracy.

Kamala Harris has also become the target of pro-Trump people. Among the theories, the well-known one of birtherism. “We have seen the reappearance of this conspiratorial device favored by pro-Trump people and Trump himself, which consists of explaining that a candidate, here Kamala Harris, would not be of American nationality and that therefore she would be illegitimate as a candidaterecalls Tristan Mendès France. We call it birtherism and Barack Obama already did it in 2011 on behalf of Trump. Coming back to Kamala Harris, we may have forgotten her but already in 2020, when she was named Biden’s vice-president, Trump had already implied that she might not be American.

Since the end of July, the Democratic candidate has been targeted by a violent online defamation campaign. According to Trumpists, Kamala Harris is actually a man. A slanderous process typical of the complosphere.

“United States: when conspiracy takes hold in the presidential campaign”, this is the 73rd episode of Complorama with Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, and Tristan Mendès France, lecturer and member of the conspiracy observatory , specialist in digital cultures. A podcast to be found on the franceinfo website, the Radio France application and several other platforms such as Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict, Spotify, or Deezer.