The Alex Jones Presidency

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/opinion/trump-alex-jones-conspiracy.html

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More than five years after a gunman murdered 20 first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., their families still get daily threats and online abuse from listeners of Alex Jones, whose claim that the massacre was a hoax is one of the many bogus conspiracy theories he peddles on his InfoWars radio broadcast and website. The Times’s Elizabeth Williamson wrote a moving account of the families’ effort to hold Mr. Jones legally accountable.

People like Mr. Jones, who says 9/11 was an inside job and the government blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, have been around from the distant days when they were called “the lunatic fringe.”

Now he’s mainstream.

During the last presidential campaign, after Mr. Jones had been spouting vicious nonsense about Sandy Hook for years, Donald Trump appeared on his show to tell him: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

He hasn’t.

Mr. Trump, who built his political career by spreading the racist lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, has kept the conspiracy theories flowing now that he’s in the White House.

After winning the presidency but losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has continued to insist that there were millions of fraudulent votes cast. He even created a widely derided commission that was supposed to prove this point. (It died fairly quickly after accomplishing nothing.)

But Mr. Trump has truly done Mr. Jones proud as the potential legal peril the president faces from the special counsel’s investigation has broadened and deepened. With the files of his chief fixer, Michael Cohen, in the hands of investigators, and Mr. Cohen’s future cooperation with the special counsel a strong possibility, one can feel the panic as the president promotes one bizarre claim after another about the inquiry.

His most recent rant has been that the “deep state” planted a spy in his campaign. People familiar with the matter said that person was not a spy but an F.B.I. informant, an American academic who had worked for years with Republicans. He had been finding out what Trump campaign officials who had contact with suspected Russian agents knew about the Russian hacking of Democratic emails. One of those officials has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

Before that fantasy, Mr. Trump tried to prove that the Russia investigation was a partisan witch hunt by claiming the F.B.I. was following Democratic-funded opposition research. In fact, the investigation began before investigators knew of that research, after they learned of a campaign official’s meeting with people tied to Russian intelligence.

Before that, he accused the Obama administration of planting a bug in Trump Tower, which Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department later said was not true.

And of course there is his central hoax, the claim that Russia did not hack the election. Mr. Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians tends to disprove that. Oh, and the nation’s intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that the Russians interfered in the election, with an eye to helping Mr. Trump win.

Mr. Trump may hope that Americans will engross themselves in his alternative reality before the special counsel can lay out all he knows, possibly with more indictments and guilty pleas to add to the ones he has so far. But the truth will likely win out.

That’s something to consider in deciding whether Mr. Trump should talk to Mr. Mueller, Rudolph Giuliani, now a Trump lawyer, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. Not because the president would lie, Mr. Giuliani said — heavens no.

“Truth is relative,” Mr. Giuliani explained. “They may have a different version of the truth than we do.”

Alex Jones couldn’t have said it better.