US President Donald Trump presents articles he says report violence against Afrikaners during a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House on May 21. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, the Washington Post
After United States President Donald Trump wrongly suggested that Social Security funds were going to millions of dead people, his Administration spent weeks revamping the agency’s database.
When Trump seized on a debunked claim that South Africa’s Government was systematically massacring white farmers, US officials developed plans to resettle 1000 of them.
And in recent days, the Justice Department wrapped up an investigation that took several months and considerable FBI resources by announcing that – contrary to an internet conspiracy theory pushed by many Trump allies – the department was not concealing an explosive list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, and the alleged sex trafficker had not been secretly murdered.
As the Administration approaches its six-month mark, Trump officials have regularly shown they are willing to throw the machinery of government into gear – redirecting employees, spending taxpayer money, and in some cases changing policy – in the service of conspiracy theories or easily disproved assertions.
“We used to say, ‘Well, it’s just some guy in his basement; he doesn’t have the power to do anything,’” said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories.
“But people in government have power to do seriously damaging things. That is the issue now. It’s in government and they are acting on these ideas.”
Trump – who has told tens of thousands of falsehoods during his political career – has long been attracted to outlandish stories, especially if they bolster his worldview.
During the presidential campaign, he claimed without evidence that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats.
After taking office, he said the Biden Administration had been planning to provide US$50 million in condoms to Hamas. Both assertions quickly fell apart under scrutiny.
Now Trump and his aides can deploy the vast resources of the US Government in support of such false claims.
Renée DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, said the country is in an unprecedented era when conspiracy theories move almost instantly from internet chatter to government policy.
“What is different now is the extent to which a story or a theory is emerging from the online community, political influencers are amplifying it, and then the political elites are picking it up and instrumentalising it immediately,” DiResta said.
On occasion, putting conspiracy theorists in charge of investigating them can have indirect benefits, as in the Epstein case, experts said.
“It’s a double-edged sword. When you hear someone in power endorse a conspiracy theory, it gives it some validity,” said Mick West, founder of Metabunk.org and author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic and Respect.
“But if they investigate it, sometimes the conspiracy theory is not what people hoped.”
That very outcome in the Epstein case is now causing problems for the Administration.
Online activists who previously blamed the Biden Administration for purportedly covering up Epstein’s murder are now turning their wrath on Trump aides, saying they have joined the cover-up.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that supporters should “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about”.
The White House said Trump is responding to the needs and desires of voters.
“President Trump has restored a government that truly answers to the American people,” White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said in an email.
“Nearly 80 million Americans gave President Trump a historic mandate to Make America Great Again and he is delivering on that promise in record time. The Trump Administration is the most transparent and responsive Administration in history.”
Trump is not alone among his circle in his penchant for lurid storytelling.
Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said recently her agency was in the process of deporting a “cannibal” when he started eating himself, inflicting enough damage to require “medical attention” (her department has declined to offer any explanation or evidence).
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr, has theorised in the past that the coronavirus was engineered to spare Chinese and Jewish people, later saying his comment was misunderstood.
Conspiracy theories can seem ubiquitous in this turbulent political moment.
The idea that contrails, the vapour streaks produced by airplanes, are secretly laden with chemicals has caught on in some circles; legislators in several states have proposed bills to ban such non-existent “chemtrails”.
In recent days, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the deadly floods in Texas stemmed from cloud seeding, which experts say is impossible.
Epstein
Baseless claims can be more powerful when they are married to government power.
Shortly after Epstein died in prison in 2019 in an apparent suicide, the internet erupted with unfounded claims of a cover-up, with some declaring that Epstein was killed because he’d been blackmailing powerful people who were on a secret client list.
There was little if any evidence for this, but influential figures including then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson spoke ominously of shadowy assassins and government conspiracies.
“You don’t want to live in a country where it’s possible to murder people in federal lockup, cover up the killings, and then get away with them,” he said in a 2023 segment.
When Trump took office, his aides deployed teams of agents, analysts, lawyers and experts to comb through volumes of evidence, saying they were committed to transparency on the issue.
Then last week, they disclosed their findings: As three previous investigations had concluded, Epstein had no client list, was not blackmailing anyone and died by his own hand.
“One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims,” the FBI and Justice Department said in a memo. “Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”
Christopher O’Leary, who spent more than two decades as an FBI counter-terrorism agent, noted that leaders of the Justice Department and FBI had promoted the Epstein conspiracy theories before taking office.
“Once they came into their jobs, they were responsible for uncovering the details beneath this conspiracy, which did not exist, so they had to go through the motions,” O’Leary said. “The review, in my assessment, was performative.”
It took time from counter-terrorism, counter-espionage and other important matters, he added.
“You have finite resources, and if you are focused on something like this, you are not doing other things you should be doing,” O’Leary said.
“At one point nearly the entire New York field office, certainly on the criminal side, had to be focused on this, because it was the attorney-general’s priority.”
Democrats are now seeking an advantage from the Trump Justice Department’s conclusions. Some are demanding that Attorney-General Pam Bondi testify as to why she initially suggested a client list exists and is now saying it doesn’t.
Other Democrats are taking a conspiratorial tone themselves, suggesting without evidence that a list is being kept secret because Trump is on it.
Benefits
Equally baseless was a Trump claim that millions in Social Security payments had been fraudulently going to people over 100 years old. The assertion was quickly disproved; while the deceased people were still on the books because of the quirks of an ageing programming system, no money was going to them.
Yet Trump later went on an extended riff about the matter in his address to Congress in March. “A lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid,” he told a national audience. “It really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.”
The US Doge Service – the cost-cutting effort then led by billionaire Elon Musk – spent 11 weeks on a “major clean-up” of the Social Security database, announcing on May 23 that roughly 12.3 million individuals listed as older than 120 had now been correctly listed as dead. Social Security officials had previously declined to undertake such a clean-up, saying it would divert important resources without a clear benefit.
During those 11 weeks, parts of the agency ground to a halt, according to an employee who worked with the Doge team. Senior employees devoted full days to the issue.
Staffers were assigned to pull data, answer Doge’s questions and ultimately move millions of long-dead people to a different database.
It was painstaking work, given the risk of accidentally labelling someone deceased, which would have cut off their benefits. “For at least a month or two, that was multiple people’s only job,” the employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, pressed by Fox Business on whether fraud had been uncovered, said it was important to clean up messy records because they were a “source of potential for fraud”.
Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor who served as Social Security administrator under President Joe Biden, said the agency’s technology did need updating – but in this instance, it was undertaken to justify a falsehood.
“They are spending a lot of effort and a lot of money to give cover to the big lie - in this case, the big lie that lots of dead people are receiving Social Security,” O’Malley said.
“Then they proudly crow they have cleaned up the database by filling in anyone with a death date.”
Afrikaners
Trump seized even more dramatically on false claims that white farmers in South Africa were being systematically massacred, confronting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office in May to demand that he take action.
South Africa has struggled with violence against both black and white people, but there is no evidence of a genocide, diplomats say, let alone one enabled by the Government.
Trump, with cameras rolling, showed Ramaphosa a video of what he said were more than 1000 graves of murdered farmers, although it turned out the mounds were part of a protest, not actual graves.
Based on such claims, the Administration granted refugee status to white Afrikaners from South Africa – at a time it was rejecting other would-be refugees.
The Administration has now developed a plan to resettle 1000 Afrikaners in the US before the end of September; officials did not respond to a request about the status of the plan.
Autopen
Earlier this year, Trump began claiming that Biden’s staff had repeatedly made use of an autopen – a machine that uses real ink to duplicate a human signature – to improperly approve presidential actions and cover up his purported mental decline.
Critics from both parties have said that Biden was clearly ageing at the end of his term and should not have sought re-election. But there have been no credible assertions that he suffered from actual cognitive decline or was unable to make decisions.
Trump on June 4 ordered an investigation, to be headed by the White House counsel and the attorney-general, on Biden’s use of an autopen, and more broadly into whether his ostensible infirmity was covered up.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline,” Trump said in an executive order.
Autopens have been regularly used by presidents at least since George W. Bush, and Biden responded to Trump’s move with a statement saying: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry about the status of the investigation.
Vaccines
HHS under Kennedy has been especially hospitable to debunked or unproven claims.
Kennedy, who has a long history of disparaging vaccination, said in the northern spring that he is looking into whether children develop autism after they receive the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, a link that has been thoroughly debunked.
More than a dozen studies in peer-reviewed top journals in recent decades have rejected such a link.
Kennedy has said HHS has a “massive testing and research effort” under way involving “hundreds of scientists from around the world” to look into the causes of autism by September, raising alarm among researchers who suspect the effort is designed to blame vaccines.
Uscinski, the University of Miami conspiracy theory expert, said the risk of powerful individuals embracing falsehoods ultimately goes beyond a debatable use of resources.
“When people who have power act on conspiracy theories, especially if they are in government, they can do so in a way that can seriously harm others,” Uscinski said.
“When you start chasing phantoms, you will end up chasing real people if you can’t find the phantoms.”
- Hannah Natanson, Lena H. Sun and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.