Alerts of electoral fraud, immigrants described as savages, accusations of manipulation at Democratic rallies… Since the beginning of the campaign for the 2024 presidential elections, Donald Trump has continued to spread false information, conspiracy theories and racist stereotypes, expanding the list of your “alternative truths.”
But this panorama, which has become almost banal, hides another reality. Beyond the denial of his 2020 defeat and his place in the QAnon mythology, Donald Trump has a relationship with a complex, multifaceted and changing conspiracy, as revealed by the analysis of 870 openly conspiratorial messages posted since 2009 on Twitter and his Truth social network.
“It manages to be extreme to a certain extent and restrain itself in certain contexts, to be at the same time radical and reasonable, observes André Gagné, professor at Concordia University in Montreal, author of These evangelicals behind Trump (Labor and Fides, 2020). He has a phenomenal ability to adapt his speech. »
Attacks on Barack Obama as a start
When this former Democratic Party donor joined the Republicans, he first posed as the spokesman for birthsa radical community that accuses President Barack Obama of not having been born in the United States, in violation of the Constitution.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump repeated the attack thirty-seven times on Twitter, sometimes suspecting that Barack Obama was Kenyan, Muslim or had even provided a false certificate, which he supported on television. “This was their gateway to the party.explains Françoise Coste, historian of the Republican Party at the University of Toulouse, author of Reagan (Tempus Perrin, 2018). This had such an impact on audiences and the party base that it built political legitimacy. »
Show of his opportunism, he distances himself from the movement birth in the middle of the 2016 election campaign and accuses Hillary Clinton of having been the initiator. Meanwhile, he has deployed the full arsenal of conservative conspiracy, maintained in particular by the think tank The Heritage Foundation, apparently convinced of Democratic election fraud, climate skeptic and subtly anti-vaccine. He goes even further.
Mexican scapegoat and “great replacement”
While the Republican Party is in favor of immigration, a source of labor for the agri-food industry, the billionaire campaigns on the promise of a wall on the border with Mexico. “All the candidates were trying to appeal to the Latino vote, and by attacking illegal Mexicans, they took the opposite tack”observes Marie-Laure Mallet, professor of English studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, co-author of United States and Latin America from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama (Ellipses, 2023).
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