We are in one of the few times in modern history where conspiracy thinking has entered mainstream American politics in a serious way. Although conspiracy thinking as we know it has been around at least since the French Revolution, we have seen a surge in its importance globally, especially in the United States where this mode of discourse is being driven by Donald Trump and his supporters. Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum provide important insights into this phenomenon in their recent book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.

Whereas traditional conspiracy thinking has rested on the idea that there are powerful hidden forces intentionally controlling events for some larger purpose, the authors argue that Trump-style conspiracy relies on no such claim. In “presidential conspiracy” (pp. 1–2), the president actively works to turn one sector of the people against another with accusations that he pulls out of thin air. Unlike traditional conspiracy thinking, there is no attempt to build a theory with evidence, but merely an exhortation to affirm repeated assertions (p. 52). This “social validation” (p. 3) is demonstrated by things such as retweets and “likes” on Facebook, and ultimately amounts to an “assault on reality” (p. 8). The authors are correct to point to the extraordinarily dangerous and highly unusual phenomenon of a president who uses the authoritative weight of his office in an attempt to call truth itself into question purely for the aggrandizement of his own ego. Although many public intellectuals and political scientists have pointed to the Trump moment as a kind of populism that is transforming the Republican party, Muirhead and Rosenblum contend correctly, in my view, that he is in fact anti-political party. As the authors show, Mr. Trump belonged to neither political party for most of his life and has actively worked to exploit divisions in the Republican Party itself (pp. 75–76). One of the most alarming features of this approach is Trump’s presentation of himself as the arbiter of facts as contrasted with elitist experts. The authors cite the hurricane in Puerto Rico where the President tweeted the lie that, “3000 people did not die…. This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible, the correct number is in the range of 6 to 18” (p. 102). Certainly, we have seen this demonstrated repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic and by explicit prohibitions from Trump to his own executive agencies about speaking of climate change (p. 110–11).

Although I applaud the authors for this important and timely book, I challenge two principal arguments that they make. First, I am not persuaded that this style of conspiracy thinking is fundamentally new, and second, I very much disagree with the claim that it has no overarching goal or theory. The title of the book refers to the allegedly new way in which Trump spreads conspiracy via rumors, saying and tweeting things such as “even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something out there” (p. 28). This is a point that has also been made by journalist Jenna Johnson who cites numerous examples in her Reference Johnson2016 article in the Washington Post. While true that this is the Trump style, it is not new. For example, Greenhill and Oppenheim (Reference Greenhill and Oppenheim2017) have analyzed conspiratorial rumors as a factor in spreading violence in areas of global instability and conflict. And Stephen Bronner (Reference Bronner2003) has pointed to the role of rumor as far back as the spread of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Russia and Europe via the faked Protocols of The Elders of Zion. We can look to the witch trials for a final example, where the accusations of witchcraft made against women were almost always stoked and preceded by rumors of their connections to magic and Satan.

I also take issue with the idea that Trumpian conspiracism has no overarching goal or theory. The cause may be invisible to the authors because they make a crucial omission in not including a discussion of the importance of ultra-right beliefs, white supremacism, nationalism and misogyny for this brand of conspiracy theory—all of which have been very clearly articulated in Breitbart and by many Trump supporters and advisers. Conspiracies give explanatory power to the ultra-right point of view. How else could one explain a Black man becoming president and a woman under consideration as his successor absent a conspiracy? How could one contend with religious pluralism when one feels they are being replaced by Muslims and Jews? In fact, this is the theory linked to French writer Renaud Camus’s “replacement theory,” a theory explicitly used by the nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Camus wrote, “The great replacement is very simple, you have one people and in the space of a generation you have a different people” (Charlton Reference Charlton2019). Thus, the authors’ claim that there is “no call for collective action to free the nation” (p. 31) ignores these underlying ideologies, which are in fact, precisely representative of just such calls.

“Birtherism” and “pizzagate,” both of which the authors cite as random assertions with no theoretical link, are in fact clearly linked to this larger conspiratorial worldview and are completely consistent with the broader complex of international conspiracies reflected in far-right fictional favorites such as The Turner Diaries and Camp of the Saints. The latter work, depicting a fictional Muslim takeover, was explicitly promoted both by Steve Bannon and White House adviser Stephen Miller (Garcia-Navaro Reference Garcia-Navaro2019). Indeed, we have seen actual calls to violence consistent with these conspiracies from the president on more than one occasion, including in his Mount Rushmore speech and in his references to how to stop Hillary Clinton in 2016. As he mused at a rally, “although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know” (p. 66). His recent deployment of federal troops to US cities to put down #BLM antiracism uprisings is also consistent with this belief system. Finally, these are all very clearly linked to the view of him perpetrated by the increasingly mainstream “QAnon” movement which sees him as a warrior against a “deep state” that will rig the November 2020 election against him.

Though flawed, A Lot of People Are Saying should certainly be read as one of the very important recent works warning us of the perils of failing to take Trumpian conspiracy theorists seriously as threats to democracy.