‘Our government likes to hide things’: How Trump conspiracy theories are affecting the election
On the grassy knoll next to Dealey Plaza, Nelson Vargas, a New Yorker and Trump supporter, gazed down at the spot where John F. Kennedy was assassinated 61 years ago and confided that he didn’t believe a word of the official story.
“Kennedy was on the verge of ending our commitment in Vietnam,” said Mr Varga, 58, a retiree. “We had been warned about the military-industrial complex and they took him out. It was a conspiracy against the will of the people.”
The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three single shots and acted alone—the conclusion of the Warren Commission in 1964—was preposterous, he insisted. Similarly, when Thomas Crooks, 20, took aim at Donald Trump, the former president, in Butler, Pennsylvania, in August this year, Mr Vargas was convinced there were darker forces at work.
“He [Crooks] should have never gotten a shot off from that vantage point that I’ve seen,” he said. “There was no resistance to him and there were two snipers to the right of the president [Trump] and they had their weapons pointed directly at the gentleman [Crooks]. It was wilful malice.”
Again and again on a quiet Sunday in Dallas, American voters stated that both Kennedy and Trump were the victims of sinister elements of the US government acting to subvert democracy by murdering the leaders they opposed.
There is fertile ground for conspiracy theories to flourish: Trump’s branding of mainstream journalism as “fake news” and labelling of the government as the “deep state”; social media algorithms that push outlandish claims; and disinformation seeded by domestic extremists and foreign governments such as Russia.
“There’s stuff that they won’t tell us, right?” said Alexander Jarossy, 32, an engineer from Richmond, Virginia. “Our government likes to hide things from the citizens.”
Jeff Fulginiti, 71, a retired credit manager from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said Kennedy had been shot from the front as well as from the back by Oswald, who fired through a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. “I don’t know how many shooters there were but I also believe possibly the mafia and the CIA were involved.”
Russell Bowden, 32, a carpenter from New Jersey, said that Lyndon Johnson, the vice-president who became president when Kennedy died, and America’s “military-industrial complex” had organised the November 1963 hit so they could profit from what became the Vietnam War.
“There was no second shooter,” he said. “There was no third shooter. Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who took the shot. Jack Ruby [who killed Oswald two days later] was the one to dispose of the evidence. LBJ was behind it.”
Fast forward to 2024 and there was a similar conspiracy, Bowden posited, which ended with Secret Service snipers shooting Crooks dead. “Crooks was the sacrificial lamb that was supposed to take a shot that missed, thankfully, and the police were there to clean up the evidence afterward,” he said.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that 65 per cent of Americans believed that Kennedy was not killed by Oswald acting alone. A decade earlier, the satirical website “The Onion” lampooned the proliferation of theories: “Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles.”
Rodger Jones, 73, an artist who sells paintings at Dealey Plaza, said: “The people who come here for the whodunit over Kennedy are Trump people, by and large. They apply similar thought processes today because they see a president who was dogged and spied upon during the four years he was in office.”
Mr Jones had heard people theorise that an additional gunman had emerged from a storm drain to kill Kennedy or that the driver in his limousine had turned around and shot him. Another suspect was the police officer J.D. Tippit, who was killed by Oswald, according to the Warren Commission.
The artist’s own view is that the CIA was linked to the assassination, though perhaps not responsible for it. “It’s pretty clear that Oswald was either an asset of the CIA or in very close touch with the CIA, and they perhaps had him on a leash, but the leash was perhaps a little too long,” he speculated.
Theories about Crooks are less elaborate, for the time being at least. “Kennedy was more than 60 years ago, so it’s relatively early,” said Bowden.
Trump has himself stoked conspiracy theories about Kennedy and has promised to release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F Kennedy” if he is elected next month.
When he was last in the White House, the Republican was persuaded by Mike Pompeo, the then-CIA director, that making all documents fully public would damage privacy or national security. So far, some 3,100 documents have been released only with redactions, out of around 320,000 documents in total.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose father, John F. Kennedy’s brother, was assassinated in 1968, has been floated as a possible CIA director under Trump. He has said he believes the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle.
Roger Stone, a former Trump aide, wrote a 2013 book accusing Lyndon Johnson. In 2016, Trump floated the notion that the Cuban father of Senator Ted Cruz, his then-rival for the Republican presidential nomination, had been involved.
Conspiracy theories about Kennedy and Trump are not limited to the Right. Many on the Left maintain that shadowy forces of reaction orchestrated the murder of Kennedy. When Crooks tried to kill Trump, so-called “BlueAnon” Democrats swiftly concluded that the Republican candidate himself had arranged it.
An aide to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Linkedin founder and Democratic donor, sent out an email stating it was possible that the shooting “was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash”. Some on the Left posted photos purporting to show that Trump’s ear was not nicked by a bullet, as the FBI later confirmed.
All the indications are that Crooks was a troubled misfit who wanted to kill a public figure to achieve fame. But Trump has openly speculated that Iran might have been behind Crooks and another apparent attempted assassin, Ryan Routh, 58, who was arrested in September after allegedly laying in wait with a rifle next to the Florida golf course where the former president had teed off.
Suspicion of the federal government is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in which he stated that the US was “an arena for angry minds” characterised by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that led to “paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people”.
Certainly, that seemed to fit the pre-election atmosphere at Dealey Plaza.
A handful of visitors, however, were having none of it. Evan Kielmeyer, 26, a marketing writer for Puma, said that, partly influenced by his study of history at Boston College, he had concluded both Oswald and Crooks acted alone.
“A lot of times, you’ve got these people that are unsteady and they want to make a name for themselves and they want to be big and, unfortunately, in this country there’s a lot of access to weapons…It’s that simple.”
