A "Must Read" Article: Trump/Infowars

Click here for an article in The New Yorker, by William Finnegan, entitled "Donald Trump and the 'Amazing' Alex Jones." It was published on June 23, 2016, so it was before many of the events on the campaign -- Trump's appointment of Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his chief advisor, for instance. Not realizing the important role Breitbart.com would play in the Trump campaign, he refers to Breitbart News dismissively as merely "a hapless dispenser of right-wing agitprop."

This post relates to three of my earlier publications: Stupid Trump Tweet; Stupid Trump Tweet, Updated; and Trump Gets His Information From Infowars.

Click here for another earlier post, "Alex Jones, Presidential Sidekick."



In "Trump Gets His Information From Infowars,: I said "There's enough information on the Trump/Infowars connection to justify a separate post." Here it is.

Finnegan's article details elements of the close connection between Donald Trump and Infowars' Alex Jones. There's a lot of meat to the article, so I'm going to quote extensively. Finnegan opens with discussion of the coverage of the events of the San Bernadino shootings on December 2, 2015. He says he noticed that some of the Internet coverage seemed a bit off -- and he mentioned Infowars.

Jones’s guest on his show the morning of the shooting had been, as chance would have it, Donald Trump. Jones had praised Trump, claiming that ninety per cent of his listeners were Trump supporters, and Trump had returned the favor, saying, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

Jones’s amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, “false flag” ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns).

Finnegan goes on to list a number of Jones's other farfetched conspiracy theories.

Does Donald Trump actually believe any of this? Or is he laughing up his sleeve as apoplectic fact-checkers throw themselves into the thankless work of disproving his absurdities? To cover himself, he prefaces his more outlandish remarks with disclaimers like “I hear” or “A lot of people think.” (To back up his contention that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims publicly celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, he tweeted a link to Infowars. His source for the California-drought denial also seemed to be Infowars.)

Finnegan discusses Trump's penchant for lying repeatedly:

The Huffington Post assigned a team of researchers to document the fabrications in a single hour-long Trump appearance on CNN. They counted seventy-one, or one fib for every hundred and sixty-nine words uttered (including Anderson Cooper’s words). Huff Post readers were presumably appalled, but were any Trump supporters given pause about the character of their man by this brain-fogging list of falsehoods? It seems doubtful. Trump is playing a different game. He gestures toward beliefs, hunches, prejudices, and constituencies on the margins. He is playing to Americans who do not trust the media or traditional information sources, such as the government. He offers alternative narratives, fantasies that shock and satisfy. He entertains. On “Meet the Press,” after Chuck Todd asked him for evidence supporting his claim that a protester at one of his rallies had ties to the Islamic State, Trump said, “All I know is what’s on the Internet.” He said that.

We know that Trump regularly watches cable TV news, since he sometimes responds to TV stories in real time. This article talks about Trump's consumption of "print" media; not being a computer guy, he gets a daily printout of 30 to 50 Google News results for "Donald J. Trump." Finnegan says: "His appetite for facts appears to be tiny."

Even after Trump (and Sean Hannity, of Fox News) fell victim to a joke—a parody news story “reporting” that two hundred and fifty thousand Syrian refugees would be settled on U.S. Indian reservations—he continued to repeat the bogus figure for months. (He knew better than to touch, from the same Web site, “Trump: I Would Have Prevented the Asteroid from Killing the Dinosaurs.”) His appetite for facts appears to be tiny. In a GQ profile of Hope Hicks, his spokeswoman, by Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s daily news briefing is described as printouts of “30 to 50 Google News results for ‘Donald J. Trump.’

More after the jump.


Finnegan refers to a period time last summer when Trump claimed that Obama and Hillary founded ISIS. At a rally in Florida, he said “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.” He added, “I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

I felt at the time that that assertion was reckless and dangerous, because, ridiculous as it may seem, there are elements in the Middle East who actually believe that the U.S. started and nurtured ISIS. Finnegan says:

Trump’s groundless insinuations hit a new low last week, after the mass shooting in Orlando, when he repeatedly suggested that President Obama secretly supports the Islamic State. This idea can be found in odd corners of the Internet—it is gospel on Infowars—but Trump’s version of it provoked such a storm of criticism, including from fellow-Republicans, that he felt obliged to tweet a link to a report from Breitbart News, a hapless dispenser of right-wing agitprop, headlined “HILLARY CLINTON RECEIVED SECRET MEMO STATING OBAMA ADMIN ‘SUPPORT’ FOR ISIS.” The memo in question was a declassified 2012 field report from Iraq, compiled by an unspecified source at the Defense Intelligence Agency. ISIS, as now constituted, did not exist at the time. The field report described the state of the Syrian opposition, made no policy recommendations, and could not in any way be interpreted as “stating” American “support” for ISIS or for its predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Michael Morell, a former C.I.A. director, demolished the Breitbart story, and Trump, in a column for Politico.

But the notion that the United States secretly supports ISIS (ladies and gentlemen, please disregard those thousands of air strikes against ISIS by U.S. bombers) is not confined to the loonier quarters of the American right. It’s a powerful line of Iranian government propaganda, disseminated and widely believed among Iraqi Shiites, who proclaim it even in parliament in Baghdad.

The article goes on to say:

Does Donald Trump know anything about this? Unlikely. He is an insult machine, not a policy wonk. He may know, on some level, that the nonsense he speaks and tweets is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean he actually knows anything else about the world. He has gut instincts for pleasing members of a fact-averse crowd—for speaking what’s on their minds. He seems to be a narcissist of bottomless insecurity and need. His fast-twitch response to the Orlando massacre showed a man devoid of the most basic empathy. The idea that he might come to power is, to say the least, unsettling. Earlier this month, Senator Mark Kirk, the Illinois Republican, had heard enough. “Given my military experience,” Kirk announced, “Donald Trump does not have the temperament to command our military or our nuclear arsenal.”

I've heard it said that any nation that would elect Donald Trump president deserves to have Donald Trump as its president. Sad!

UPDATE: Click here for yet another article on this subject, by Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch, entitled "Trump’s Voter Fraud Lie Shows Power Of Conspiracy Theories And Signals Future Attack On Voting Rights."