From UFOs to missing scientists, has Trump made conspiracy theories mainstream?

From UFOs to missing and dead scientists, fringe ideas and conspiracy theories have come to the forefront during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration.

On Friday, the U.S. government released dozens of previously classified files about unidentified anomalous phenomena, previously known as UFOs. And in April, the Trump administration confirmed it would investigate reports of missing and dead scientists connected to U.S. research, which have sparked speculation online.

CBC’s Washington correspondents say they’re examples of Donald Trump’s complicated relationship with the truth, and his attempts to use conspiracy theories to his advantage, from claims of election fraud, to calling into question whether Barack Obama was actually American.

This week, Katie Simpson, Paul Hunter and Willy Lowry dig into the long history of conspiracy theories intersecting with American politics and ask the question: Has Trump made conspiracy theories mainstream?

We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion follow the podcast here: Spotify | Apple | CBC Listen | All podcast apps | YouTube

Katie Simpson: Remember, Donald Trump built a very diverse coalition to win in 2024, and part of that was getting people who are not regular voters out to the polls. And some of that is the conspiracy-minded folks who look at things like that and say, ‘I want to see these files, I want to know what’s going on with the deep state, so I’m going to give Donald Trump my vote.’

It’s another question about whether that’s now coming to bite him and there’s political consequences, but are there consequences? Who’s going to jail? Not in America.

Paul Hunter: Are we right to think that it seems like in Trump’s second term now — that it’s like conspiracy theories — there are just more of them all the time?

Willy Lowry: [Monday] on Truth Social, the president’s social media platform, gives us kind of a perfect example for how conspiracy theories are spread and circulated in Trump’s second term. He posted dozens and dozens of times [that] night. Most of them were reposts … But I’m just going to go through them. So he reposted a post claiming that Obama knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails. He reposted something about Dominion Voting Systems, about how forensic images confirm that an anonymous user logged into an election management system remotely on Nov. 5, 2020, suggesting I’m not even sure what. He reposted something saying that Obama is the most demonic force in American politics in decades.

The list just goes on and on and on. And again, this is the president of the United States. Even if it’s a mere repost and not his own words, he’s got millions and millions of followers, millions of Americans take what he says as gospel. So this is in part how these theories are spread.

Katie Simpson: We are so used to the fact that Donald Trump posts things that are not rooted in reality on social media, and it’s to the point that we don’t even cover it as news anymore. It’s like when Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office and he speaks for 60 minutes and we parse out a 15-second line of what’s new about whatever story we’re covering that day … And we’re so used to and numb to the other, say, 60 minutes of what he has to say, whether it be rooted in reality or not rooted in reality.

I’m specifically thinking about election fraud claims, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him. It doesn’t even make the news anymore because it happened so frequently and we all just shrug it off and it’s like, has the world just been trained to ignore this?

Paul Hunter: And one of the questions we’re asking here is whether Trump has made conspiracy theories mainstream by doing it, and normalizing it, is a word we’ve used a lot. Does he normalize this kind of thinking? Often in a lot of what Trump has said, I think it’s fair to say on conspiracy theories or other things, there’s sometimes like a hint of something, a grain of something that is sort of true, which allows you to believe the rest of it. And by the way … it does complicate what journalists do because there is a little bit of truth there, but it is amplified in an incorrect or misleading way. And that becomes the problem, and yet there it is in the mainstream.