Judge rules White House must return passes to CNN, Politico, MS Now
Scholars and legal experts say President Donald Trump’s conspiratorial attacks on critics and opponents — including his claims of an election-security “crisis,” an AI “hoax” and a “grand conspiracy” against him — endanger US freedoms, public health and science. The warnings, gathered in a Guardian report published Oct. 1, come as the midterm elections approach and days after a federal judge ordered the White House to return press passes to three barred news outlets.
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said conspiracies “are page one of the repressive playbook,” noting that Mao, Stalin, Putin and other authoritarian leaders have historically launched attacks on enemies by floating conspiracies. “They’re almost always used to justify repression,” Levitsky said, adding that authoritarian leaders can simply allege conspiracies without providing any, or only minimal, “evidence.”
Scholars and former federal officials say Trump’s tarring of foes in conspiratorial attacks endangers democracy and recall the tactics of the infamous rightwing lawyer Roy Cohn, a key promoter of the “red scare” in the 1950s whom Trump had close ties with in the 1980s during his early New York real estate career. Princeton historian Julian Zelizer said Trump, “mentored by Roy Cohn, learned that baseless allegations about shady forces working against him could serve to mobilize and lead the public to see him as a victim rather than a wrongdoer.” “Whenever faced with criticism, such as from the media or about his AI policies, his instinct is to throw out charges of a vast conspiracy that is out to get him,” Zelizer said.
In a notable twist, Trump charged in mid-September that some AI leaders and experts were engaging in a big “conspiracy” and perpetrating a “HOAX” by urging strong safeguards to protect against potential extinction-level threats to humanity from the technology. He also, without evidence, disparaged critics of datacenters as people who “want to end up being backwards and poor,” and asserted he was the best “guardrail” to protect society from the threats that unregulated AI poses.
Trump’s penchant for painting critics in conspiratorial tones as dangerous enemies was visible last week in his attacks on three news outlets — CNN, Politico and MS Now — which he barred from White House access, prompting them to jointly file a lawsuit on 21 September challenging the moves on First Amendment and due process grounds. In a Truth Social post the same day, Trump wrote that the White House “is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” A federal judge in DC ruled on 23 September that the administration should immediately return the press passes to the three outlets and that its punitive action against them was probably unconstitutional.
Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who was a special counsel in the White House during Trump’s first term, warned that Trump “denies, denigrates and demeans his foes by painting them as part of a conspiracy.” “He resorts to abject fabrications in response to any criticism or resistance,” Cobb said.
This year, Trump and his justice department have devoted sizable resources to bolstering his claims that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud and that the current voting system is riddled with fraud, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Trump repeated the claims in a nationally televised speech on 16 July, when he urged tough new measures to curb voting by mail and investigate non-citizen voting ostensibly to make elections more secure. In the speech, Trump made the factually inaccurate claim that non-citizen voting, which is illegal and historically negligible, poses a “crisis of election security” — a claim critics say underpins his push for new curbs on voting rights. Critics see the moves to raise bogus fears about election safety and dark forces bent on voter fraud as a tool to “undermine public confidence” in the elections, and data from the conservative Heritage Foundation cites just 100 cases of non-citizen voting over a 25-year period.
Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan, said “it seems that the Trump administration is grooming the electorate to believe that the fall election will abound with fraud.” “It is difficult to know if this effort is a pretext for seizing voting equipment, a strategy to intimidate some likely Democratic voters from showing up at the polls, or a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome, but all of it is harmful to democracy,” McQuade said.
Separately, the Justice Department has struggled for almost a year to find evidence to bring charges in an investigation looking at a “grand conspiracy” against Trump involving the so-called “deep state” going back to President Barack Obama and inquiries into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. The investigation, which Trump has cheered on, has issued subpoenas to several former national security and law enforcement officials including ex-CIA director John Brennan and ex-FBI director James Comey. The sprawling inquiry has tapped some key Trump-allied election denialists for top posts: Trump recruited 81-year-old Joe diGenova, a former prosecutor who led the effort until he abruptly announced his departure on 10 September, and ex-White House lawyer Kurt Olsen. Both lawyers had worked to discredit the 2020 election results and Joe Biden’s win. DiGenova’s departure after only five months on the job raised questions about the investigation’s direction and credibility, and followed that of Maria Medetis Long, a veteran national security prosecutor who resigned in April after reportedly voicing concerns about its direction.
Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who has represented ex-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe in the inquiry, said “the so-called Grand Conspiracy investigation turns prosecutorial practice on its head.” “It starts with designated targets, the president’s perceived enemies, and then searches for facts and bends the law to support the theory,” Bromwich said. He added that diGenova found it “easier to be an outside propagandist cheering the theory from the sidelines than have the responsibility to build such a case with actual facts.”
In energy and environmental matters, the report said, Trump and his top officials have deployed bogus conspiracies and specious information to counter growing evidence of the risks posed by climate change, and Trump has labeled climate change a “hoax” despite extensive scientific evidence that it is a reality. The administration has moved to kill energy and environmental regulations aimed at fighting climate change while promoting greater use of coal, which Trump has lauded as “clean and beautiful.” Late last year, energy officials issued emergency orders to keep open five ageing coal plants in Michigan and four other states that were scheduled to shut down, spurring some states to challenge the costly moves; in mid-September, a federal judge ruled that the energy department had exceeded its authority by ordering the Michigan plant to stay open past its retirement. In December, the administration paused leases on five offshore wind projects on the east coast, a blow to an industry whose projects were slated to power over 2.5 million homes and create 10,000 jobs; a federal judge in February issued a preliminary injunction allowing one of the five to stay open.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University science historian and professor of earth and planetary sciences, told the Guardian earlier this year that Trump’s “decisions make no sense from either the perspective of environmental protection or the cost of energy.” She added that “by blocking wind projects that [were] just about ready to go on line, and reviving dangerous and uneconomic coal-powered plants, this administration is raising both the direct costs of energy for the American people, and the indirect costs we suffer through polluted air and climate damage.” In February, the administration revoked a major scientific finding that climate change endangers public health, an idea Trump has derided as “a scam.” Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington, told PBS: “It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing.”
In healthcare, the report said, Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, have indulged in flawed and conspiratorial claims about vaccines. Trump declared flatly in August that the combined MMR vaccine for children could be “quite lethal,” without offering scientific evidence to back the claim, and has advocated breaking longstanding immunizations into three separate shots that are not currently available in the United States. Even as the death toll from the worst outbreak of measles in decades rises, Kennedy on 16 September appeared at a Washington DC conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he spearheaded for almost two decades. “Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” Kennedy told the gathering in an almost 90-minute talk. “You have friends in the White House, and we are doing this one day at a time.” Recent polls suggest about one-quarter of Americans now have doubts about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, the report said.
Zelizer noted that conspiracy theories in American politics have a long history, but that before Trump “the role of presidents and other high-level elected officials had been to push back against this part of politics, rather than to amplify these ideas.”
The claims about election fraud build on the address Trump delivered from the White House in July, when he declared the U.S. election system “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” a speech that MSI previously reported on amid falling public confidence in the fairness of elections. Read MSI’s earlier coverage.