The Republican conspiracy-theory crisis, in one tweet

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), however, would ask that we not pay so much attention to her.

While Rubio doesn’t identify the subject of his entreaty, it’s not hard to suss out. It’s legitimate to report on the embrace of conspiracy theories, he says, but such reports should be constrained by their political power. In other words, Greene’s position as a freshman backbencher in the House should temper the attention she receives.

It’s a fair point, and certainly a better approach to Greene than the one offered by Rubio’s colleague, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who told a CNN reporter that he was too busy dealing with weather-related travel issues to be familiar with Greene’s nonsense portfolio. The media must be cautious when it elevates false claims because it poses the risk of spreading untrue information and rallying more people to the fringe.

But Rubio’s tweet also reveals why his party is struggling with a base riddled with conspiracy theorists.

Rubio draws a line between those with and without significant power, but he draws it in an odd place. Yes, Greene is not powerful and is unlikely to shape significant legislation while in Congress, for a variety of reasons. But she is a member of Congress, one of 535 Americans chosen by their communities to represent them. She is not a local board member in Orlando, she’s a federal official. What’s more, she’s a federal official with a relatively large platform for her position. Yes, that’s in part because of the media attention she’s been successful generating. But it’s also in part because members of her party, like former president Donald Trump, have elevated her.

Trump was direct in his advocacy for Greene even before she won her seat in November. In August, he tweeted about her after she won her bid for the Republican primary. There was no reason for him to do so; she was nearly guaranteed to win the general election in the heavily Republican district. But perhaps encouraged by his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump declared her to be a “future Republican star.” And so she has become one.

It is certainly true that Greene has less power than, say, the president of the United States. Were she president, one assumes that Rubio would strongly advocate robust coverage of her falsehoods and an exploration of conspiracy theories she might offer that could lead to dangerous situations. Except that, if recent history is any guide, Rubio would do no such thing.

There has been no more pernicious conspiracy theory in recent months than the one fomented by Trump himself in the wake of his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Trump posited that this loss was a function of widespread, multistate election fraud conducted by Democratic officials. There was never any credible evidence presented to bolster these claims, and Trump’s assertions were regularly and quickly debunked. Yet most of those in his party simply looked the other way at his conspiracy theorizing — or tried to rationalize his behavior.

Rubio did both. When Trump first started to allege irregularities in the election and his legal team filed lawsuits aimed at overturning the results, Rubio huffily defended the then-president’s right to raise such questions. After President Biden was declared the winner of the election, Rubio continued to defend Trump’s assertions that something untoward had happened.

By the evening of Nov. 7, when the race was called, Trump’s team and his allies were already 0 for 9 in their legal challenges.

A few days later, Rubio’s approach to the issue shifted. The issue was less that there were perhaps “irregularities” to be uncovered but, instead, that concern over potential irregularities from Republican voters demanded redress. This was a clever rhetorical shift eventually used by his colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), in opposing the counting of electoral votes from several states. But it’s also a hedge, allowing Rubio to stand alongside Trump while pointing in a slightly different direction.

Rubio, like Cruz, is smart enough to know that by mid-November, there was no real evidence of fraud and that Trump’s path to a second term in office had dried up. By Nov. 23, he’d referred to Biden as president-elect. But he’s a politician and Trump had (and has) the enormous power of the Republican base. So Rubio tried to find a middle path.

Over time, Rubio mostly stopped talking about the election. Trump was still tweeting out nonsensical claims about fraud, claims no more derived from reality than Greene’s assertions about spacecraft starting wildfires in California. Rubio’s response was not, as his tweet about Greene might suggest, to forcefully confront Trump’s claims and expose them as false. His response instead was silence.

Trump’s lies about the election being stolen were dangerous, as demonstrated by the crowd that appeared in Washington on Jan. 6. He’d repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen by some left-wing conspiracy, encouraged people to come to the nation’s capital that day and, that morning, encouraged them to fight on his behalf against efforts to finalize his loss. Hundreds did, storming the Capitol.

This is the problem, distilled. You can’t demand that the only conspiracy theories worth uprooting are those from powerful people while you ignore powerful people spreading conspiracy theories. One can argue that Greene’s theories are different in nature than Trump’s, but that’s undervaluing the former president’s long track record of other conspiracy theories that most Republicans (usually including Rubio) ignored. It also misses the point that coddling efforts to place wishful thinking over reality has ripple effects.

The problem the Republican Party is having now is precisely that it has decided for years that it can ignore conspiracy theorizing in the base as fringe thinking even as it also ignores the amplification of conspiracy theories by its most powerful leader. Rubio doesn’t want Republicans painted with a broad brush by Greene’s flavor of falsehoods, understandably. But the party has already been discolored by Trump’s.

To curtail this trend, the GOP will probably have to directly and forcefully confront both Trump’s and Greene’s claims and to send a message to the base that the party stands firmly with reality.

It won’t.