The reason people want to kill Trump Weaponised conspiracies are more potent than facts

The conspiracists are already poring over details of the two attacks, and drawing inferences from them about the perpetrators. They have, for instance, noted that this weekend’s alleged would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, and the previous attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had both appeared in campaign videos produced by well-known players in the conspiracy-theory pantheon: Crooks appeared briefly in a 2022 BlackRock advert filmed at his then high school, while Routh, a pro-Ukraine activist, appeared in a 2022 campaign video reportedly produced by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Little is known about the political views of Crooks, but the fact that he seems not to have had any political opinions or social media presence whatsoever has, for conspiracy-lovers, itself been interpreted as some kind of institutional cover-up.

Inevitably, then, the internet has donned its tinfoil hat and set out to uncover what this all means. Trump had, after all, pledged to bring a swift end to the conflict in Ukraine, likely by ceding some territory to Putin. Figures such as the former NSA intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden have hinted that Routh’s Ukraine links mean he must have been in contact with “White House agencies”. Other partisans speculate that the instigator is some element of the neoconservative establishment desperate to sustain the war with Russia.

Are these people mere disposable foot-soldiers for some shadowy institutional player who fears a Trump win above all else? Who knows. Just as plausible, however, not to mention less paranoia-inducing, is the possibility that no such coordinated conspiracy exists — but rather that “stochastic terrorism” is becoming a mainstay of politics, across the ideological spectrum, as a byproduct of the new, post-truth politics of attention and weaponised “truthiness”.

The term “stochastic terrorism” is used to describe real-life political action or violence inspired by (usually online) public rhetoric. Its theorists argue that this dynamic operates when hostile rhetoric against an outgroup, originating with some leader or charismatic figure, is amplified by supporters in a way that dehumanises the target and — ultimately — legitimises spontaneous-seeming real-life violence against it.

Such rhetoric in turn relies on claims that may be of dubious factual truth, but which feel emotionally or perhaps allegorically true. This quality of “truthiness” was satirised back in 2005 by the commentator Stephen Colbert, who characterised it as a preference for statements that feel as though they ought to be true, over things that verifiably are. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” he asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”

Amid today’s digital competition for eyeballs and clicks, the aggregate result is a competitive discursive war of weaponised emotional logic, whose downstream consequences can sometimes include real-life attacks on reviled individuals or outgroups: so-called stochastic terrorism. Not without reason, progressive critics of this dynamic cite Trump’s repetition of the cat-eating rumour as a case in point. This story has already inspired a backlash in Springfield itself; and while a great many allegations and rumours have circulated, no proof of pet consumption has emerged that’s so incontrovertible as to force even Trump’s haters to accept that barbecued feline is really a thing in Ohio. Instead, all sides have embraced whichever interpretation of events feels the most truthy from their standpoint.

In other words: almost two decades on from Colbert’s coinage of “truthiness”, the news cycle no longer feels as though it’s “all fact, no heart”. Quite the contrary. And no amount of lamenting is likely to reverse this shift. For such emotive rumour-mongering is effective as a political strategy — an efficacy that rests precisely on its ambiguous relation to the truth. Taking, again, the cat-eating discourse as an example: from an attention-politics perspective whether or not the rumour is factually true is largely beside the point. Trump’s declaration was so incendiary it transcended truth altogether for the otherworld of pure meme. When your claim goes so viral that even your haters set it to music, its truth is irrelevant.

Instead, what matters is that your chosen topic dominates the public conversation. Then, once this is achieved, your team can hammer home your preferred narrative. Thus, over the past week, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance has been doing the rounds on TV, cashing in on the outrage generated by Trump’s “truthiness” missile. In this CNN segment, for example, he repeatedly dismisses accusations of misinformation, while repeating a phrase clearly intended to stick in the viewer’s mind: “Kamala Harris’ open border”.

Lest anyone be tempted to imagine that this is a uniquely cynical and calculated Right-wing strategy: it’s hardly as though Trump’s haters never do a Henry II, or use factually dubious but emotionally resonant assertions as a vector for activism. Consider the high proportion of Americans who believe Donald Trump would sign a nationwide abortion ban, despite his repeated insistence that the matter should be left to states to decide — an impression doubtless reinforced by Harris’s own habit of misrepresenting Trump’s stated position.

Is it true that Trump wants to ban abortion? Who cares? The point is the truthiness. It’s probably directionally accurate that Trump cares less about women’s right to choose than Harris, even if Harris’s assertions exaggerate the divide. And the more time Trump spends disputing the details, the more it reinforces an association between him and the (broadly unpopular) policy of banning abortion.

And this also applies, in spades, to perhaps the most truthy of all the progressive attack lines against Trump: the Hitler thing. This is a long-standing theme for his opponents, who have consistently linked Trump to Hitler. And again, what matters is less its factual accuracy than its emotional resonance. To those who recoil from Trump’s nationalistic themes, machismo and rumoured desire to gut the administration and replace it with his partisans, it has more than enough truthiness; meanwhile, for Trump himself, disputing it is only likely to strengthen the association.

And here, once again, lies the rub: the shadow of weaponised truthiness is stochastic terrorism. My meme-driven narrative takeover is someone else’s grounds for real-world violence. And in the case of the Hitler parallel, this is likely to prompt more than just bomb threats: threats which in any case turned out, according to Springfield’s mayor, to be hoax calls from overseas. By contrast, the Hitler association conflates Trump with a figure who, above all others, represents the ne plus ultra of absolute evil. And, logically, once someone has been framed as absolute evil, it follows that even extraordinary measures are justified.

Perhaps we’ll never know whether there’s any truth to the conspiracy theories out there, or whether they’re just truthy. But either way, you don’t need a shadowy cabal of nameless, deniable foreign-policy-establishment proxies to needle someone into having a pop at Trump. You just need a few nutjobs of the kind that Ryan Routh reportedly was: that is, unusually susceptible to taking literally the torrent of partisan emotional reasoning that now passes for political debate. Then, all you need to do is make a few remarks to no one in particular — and before long, someone is bound to try and rid you of this turbulent Trump.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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