Birth of a MAGA Conspiracy Theory
We were going to dwell a little more on Trump’s “unified Reich” mini-scandal today—which Joe Biden cut an ad hitting him on yesterday, but which also on close examination looks more like sloppy video editing than fashy dog whistle—but we’ve been overtaken by events.
That’s one of the age-old challenges with covering Trump: You better move fast to fully digest one scandal, because they’re putting another on your plate in just a few hours. Happy Wednesday.
Wake up, babe, new MAGA lore just dropped: Crooked Joe Biden tried to kill your favorite president, Donald J. Trump!
That’s the word on the street in Trumpworld media today, anyway. “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light,” Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted. “Does everyone get it yet???!!!!”
“WOW!” Donald Trump truthed. “I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Trump went further in a Tuesday fundraising email: “They were authorized to shoot me!”
“You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” the email blasted out to millions of the president’s fans went on. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
We hope you’re sitting down for this: It is not actually true that Biden tried to have Trump assassinated. (But would he have absolute immunity from prosecution if he did? The Supreme Court will get around to determining that, one of these days.)
This particular narrative was launched yesterday by January 6th conspiracy theorist (her words!) and friend of the show Julie Kelly, who while rummaging through filings in Trump’s classified documents case stumbled across some FBI policy statements on how the execution of its search warrant would proceed operationally. One of those documents was a “policy statement” on the “use of deadly force.”
Even a cursory read of this document makes it painfully obvious that it’s a bog-standard piece of paperwork—copied word for word from the DOJ’s policy book, the Justice Manual—limiting when armed agents are allowed to use force: “only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” Most of the document is a series of “what ifs”: “Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.” “Firearms may not be fired solely to disable moving vehicles.” “Warning shots are not permitted outside the prison context.” And so on.
It’s worth noting that not just FBI agents are allowed to use deadly force when they’re in imminent danger of death—so are you. Even at properties owned by a former president! Say you’re having a pleasant evening at Mar-a-Lago when a crazed lunatic (Rudy Giuliani, perhaps?) leaps from the bushes to murder you. Defending yourself from that attack would be a-okay under Florida law and common sense. It certainly would not constitute an attempted “assassination.”
As Reuters crime and justice reporter Brad Heath pointed out last night, “These are the rules that apply to FBI agents whenever they do anything.”
“Agents, like all cops, can use deadly force when met with a sufficiently serious threat,” Heath wrote. “The policy the FBI followed here applies all the time; they are the same rules agents follow when walking down a sidewalk.”
Do we need to keep piling up the details? How about the fact that the FBI deliberately raided Mar-a-Lago when Trump wasn’t there?
“MAGAworld invents supposed Biden outrage out of whole cloth” isn’t exactly a ‘man bites dog’ story. But a couple things need pointing out here.
One is the lunatic speed at which new lies can metastasize these days in the Trump infotainment fever swamps: This story made its way from Kelly to Greene to Trump within just a few hours.
Another is this: This is not entirely, or even primarily, a Trump problem anymore. The person who did the most to make sure this story caught on was Greene. And she did it for her own political purposes.
“Were they going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???” she tweeted. “Speaker Mike Johnson fully funded the DOJ and FBI plus new building and tied our hands behind our backs to hold them accountable.”
Then, later: “What are Republicans going to do about it? I tried to oust our Speaker who funded Biden’s DOJ AND FBI, but Democrats stopped it.”
Just a few years ago, fever-swamp stuff like this was ignored or shrugged off as a distraction by every elected Republican not named Donald Trump. Now, powerful members of Congress who live and breathe the fever swamps use this stuff every day to advance their own internal political ends.
Finally, there’s this. It’s easy (and even fun!) to laugh at the stupidity of this sort of MAGA news cycle. But the people who swallow it without a second thought aren’t laughing—they’re filling up to the brim with rage. Joe Biden tried to have Donald Trump killed is a belief that’s going straight to core storage for a big, big number of increasingly radicalized Republicans. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how that ends in tears.
—Andrew Egger
We’ve got our eye on the ball and we don’t pull our punches. Come along for the ride.
Here at The Bulwark, we like good journalism and we like to promote it. And while there are great print products out there—as JVL noted yesterday—the publications that are being created nowadays tend to be digital.
My friends Warren Rojas and Tom LoBianco have been laid off before. Nobody enjoys being fired, but unfortunately, it tends to happen a lot in the declining news industry. So when The Messenger left hundreds of journalists without a paycheck (and severance) a few months back, Rojas and LoBianco decided they’d had enough, and started their own publication: 24Sight.
I’ve known both for years (and worked with Rojas), and try and make it a point to link to their #scoops when I think our readers would appreciate the information. As I’m filling in for Bill today, I figured our readers might appreciate a brief background about them and why I link to them. Go check out their site, and I hope you’ll consider signing up.
Below is a brief, excerpted interview with co-Founder Tom LoBianco.
The Bulwark: Tom, other than 2024, what are you guys focusing on?
Tom LoBianco: So what we’re doing is a return to old-school reporting, the kind of reporting that you used to be able to do when Warren and I started out, which is going deep, checking the facts, vetting information, and writing really hard-hitting stories that are built on the reporting and ignoring the clickbait. We don’t have to chase Marjorie Taylor Greene and we’re better not doing that.
The Bulwark: Over the time I’ve known you both, you each get a lot of #scoops. Now that you’re out on your own, when scoops take on a life of their own, do you think that will affect your work?
Tom LoBianco: We’re building our audience and this 24Sight news community, starting from the people who know us. Who know that we go deep, who know that we chase things that other people don’t chase because maybe they don’t hit the story quota that week.
Maybe it takes a little while. I’ve got something—I can’t say just yet—but you might see it shortly after this publishes, that I’ve been chasing for a year. And that’s where the best journalism comes from.
Early on, when we were testing this, seeing, okay, “Can we do this alone?” One of the things, you know, from working on these big, deep investigative pieces is when you’re at a major news outlet, your best friend is the lawyer.
Can we land [a bulletproof story]? And what we did was we got the scoop on Paul Manafort having a secret shell company, his latest secret shell company, Winter Solstice Holdings, LLC, that he was using to advise the Trump campaign.
And we went through that process. We went through that story line by line and we bulletproofed it exactly the way that I used to bulletproof stories at the Associated Press.
The Bulwark: What are some of the things about corporate journalism that you will not miss?
Tom LoBianco: I love being able to chase these stories and not being asked why we didn’t have a quote unquote “scoop” about the latest quarterly fundraising numbers for some Senate campaign.
That’s not a scoop. I’m sorry. If it’s spoon-fed by a press secretary, that’s not news. They’re going to put it out two hours later. We go after the stories that they don’t want out there. We’re here to find information, intelligence on the power players, be everything that’s behind the smoke and mirrors.
The Bulwark: What are some things you guys are thinking about as you build 24Sight, to build your Substack community and let people get to know you? A lot of the success in Substack seems to be the personal connections people can establish.
Tom LoBianco: I am an, uh, older journalist . . . somebody with a speckle of gray in his beard, so I am getting better at social media and I do like engaging. I like Substack notes and I like that folks who read us drop us notes, in these early stages here. It reminds me of the way that Twitter used to be back in like 2000, when it was just a bunch of us nerding out and we’re like, “Oh, are you live tweeting the Sotomayor hearings?” Back before the porn bots and the Nazis stormed everything.
So I like it. I like the community. It feels more, I don’t mean to sound high minded here, but like . . . Why not? It’s more intellectual, the people who read and want to engage, and we like it. This feels more like the reason I got into journalism. Because every day you’re learning something. And for my little ADD brain, that is, I need to be learning something new and interesting every day.
We’re building this out, and I love reading. I’m a huge JVL fan. I think he does a great job explaining things. I like that [at 24Sight] we can go long on things. And be a little snarky too. As Jack Shafer wrote in Politico, “we’ve got to bring the swagger back.”
I’ll be linking a fair amount to Warren and Tom’s work in Overtime, but for those who hadn’t followed their work before, I hope that this gives you a small window into what they’re building over there. Go sign up!
—Jim Swift
If for some inexplicable reason you have not yet read Marc Caputo’s latest MAGAVille, the time to remedy that is now! “Whenever Donald Trump brandishes a stack of papers or reads a printout of a social media post,” he writes, “he’s relying on the work of Natalie Harp”:
Harp, 32, occupies a unique role in the history of presidential campaigns: aide who travels with a portable printer (plus paper and rechargeable batteries in a large bag) whose job is to feed Trump a steady stream of information on 8.5×11″ pieces of paper. That way, the 77-year-old doesn’t have to strain his eyes on a smartphone to read all the news that’s fit to print in MAGAville.
Harp’s nickname on the campaign—“the human printer”—underplays her importance. That’s because in Trump’s orbit, proximity to the principal is power. And with her portable printer at the ready, Harp is constantly around Trump—whether she’s sitting close to the defense table in the Manhattan courthouse on weekdays or riding the links with Trump on Sundays in Florida.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Harp gatekeeps much of what Trump sees on social media and reads in the news. . .
The campaign’s co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, don’t directly oversee Harp and, the source said, and essentially leave her alone.
“Natalie fills a role and Chris and Susie know that’s what he wants,” the source said, “so they focus on other things.”
Still, there was some grumbling when Harp and activist Laura Loomer were spotted riding with Trump on Sunday at his West Palm Beach golf course. Some suspected Harp had coordinated the Trump encounter with Loomer, who recently excoriated the campaign and Republican National Committee for hiring people who, she says, aren’t loyal enough to Trump.
This is the sort of story Marc does better than anybody: pulling back the curtain on a little piece of Trumpworld to show how the whole horrible machine ticks. There’s so much more there, too. Go read the whole thing.
Trump’s playing the 2015 hits today:
