Conspiracy Theories and the MAGA GOP

By understanding why people believe in conspiracies, we can begin to understand how so much of the Republican Party still believes Trump.

A man holds a “stop the steal” sign as rioters take over the steps of the East Front of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Photo By Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.

There are three modern political conspiracies that a good number of the American public have bought into, more or less fully.

The first we are familiar with: the Big Lie about a stolen election. This theory posits, in a nutshell, that the Democrats managed to pull off electoral fraud on a massive scale across numerous states, enough to tip the election to Joe Biden and rob Trump of his rightful win.

The second concerns the so-called “Biden Crime Family,” which takes the true narrative that Hunter Biden was profiting off of his father’s position to falsely assert that the entire Biden “family” (meaning, his father) is corrupt. This conspiracy is complicated, as many are, because it is intertwined with Russian propaganda about Ukrainian corruption. It is also now the driving factor behind an evidence-free impeachment inquiry in the House.

The third conspiracy is of “election interference,” a drum Trump and his acolytes like to beat nearly daily, which claims that federal and state prosecutors are in a coordinated effort to take Trump down in order to keep him from regaining the Oval Office. They make this assertion even though there is an independent Special Counsel in charge of both federal prosecutions and there are independent local prosecutors bringing the state charges.

These three conspiracies are all fairly easily disproved based on the facts. But facts and the truth have never stopped a conspiracy from spreading. They follow a very familiar course for modern conspiracies, and in a normal world, the public would lump them in with 9/11 truthers and Pizzagate. 

So why do they have more than a third of America in their thrall, including nearly all MAGA Republicans?

Today’s piece takes a broad look at conspiracy theories generally, examining first why so many people believe so many false things to be true. We’ll explore how conspiracy theories exhibit some unique characteristics, ones that cleverly exploit long-ingrained tendencies and vulnerabilities in human thinking and behavior.

Using these analytical concepts as our guides, we’ll then look at the three recent conspiracies listed above in greater detail and see how they fit so well into traditional conspiratorial thinking—and why it may be so difficult to extricate much of America from them.

How do humans judge if something is true or not?

Our brains judge the truth or falsity of a piece of information three ways, according to a comprehensive review of the existing literature in a study entitled Judging Truth, compiled by Elizabeth Marsh, a cognitive psychologist at Duke University, and Nadia Brashier, a cognitive scientist at Harvard.

First, humans have a tendency to believe that what we see with our own eyes is true, not false. We are a naturally trusting species and are biased toward believing that what we encounter is reality, not fiction. “It’s not the case that most of the images we see are ‘Photoshopped’ or even that most of the headlines we encounter are fake,” Brashier told PBS in an interview. “Most of what people tell us interpersonally is true. There might be lies mixed in, but it’s not the majority of what we hear.”

Second, we develop strong emotional attachments to certain narratives because they help shape our identities. Social emotions, such as anger, gratitude, and grief, guide how we view our own personal welfare versus that of others. We defend these constructed identities vigorously, even when wrong, because our self-worth is tied up with being members of a group. And our minds will work overtime to signal those beliefs to those who might agree with us, so that we will continue to be considered “in the group.” Human beings only recently evolved from a time when being ostracized from our social units usually meant death.

Third, we tend to judge the truth of something by its consistency, meaning that the more our brains encounter the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. Repetition within modern informational echo chambers has increased the power of conspiracies manyfold as we hear the same stories repeated by “trusted” members of our social networks. And media propaganda such as we see on the Fox network works so effectively precisely because it is drilled into viewers again and again, and the messaging is consistent across multiple outlets and channels.

But why do we believe conspiracies in particular?

Once our brains are ready to accept a false idea as true, due to our bias toward belief instead of skepticism, our emotional attachment to the idea as part of our social identity, and the consistency with which it is repeated to us, we are primed to accept a bigger falsehood: the conspiracy.

Not all conspiracies turn out to be false. There was a massive conspiracy within the White House in the prior administration to overturn the results of an election, for example. And that makes proving certain other conspiracies to be false all the more difficult.

When it comes to getting the public to accept big lies built from small ones, we need to consider three other factors, according to Robert Brotherton of Barnard College, who specializes in conspiracies and is the author of “Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories.”

The first is proportionality. The bigger an idea is, the bigger an explanation we expect to hear. Our brains don’t like the so-called “butterfly effect,” where a single small event, such a butterfly flapping its wings, can supposedly cause much larger ones. For something as big as economic collapse in Germany, for example, there simply has to be a big explanation, such as “the Jews are causing it.” That was the birth of the first modern Bie Lie, which led inexorably and catastrophically to the Holocaust.

Second, we spend a lot of time thinking about the motives of other people, something researchers call intentionality bias. Bad things happen, in the minds of socially attuned humans, because unseen others must have caused them to happen. This explains a lot of old myths (and many current religions) where natural disasters, plagues, and famines were blamed upon someone having displeased the gods.

Third, our brains are hungry for patterns. We want to make sense of a chaotic world, so when someone suggests a pattern to follow, this is almost irresistible to many. Our brains connect otherwise disconnected facts together to form an internally coherent story. The problem is, as parts of that story begin to crumble, our gray matter begins to invent and believe other things to shore up the story, even if by themselves those facts are simply outlandish.

Now that we understand some basic ideas behind why our brains accept false ideas so readily and are ripe for big conspiracy theory thinking, let’s look at the three modern U.S. conspiracies again and unpack them within this framework.

Conspiracy One: The Big Lie of a stolen election

There are many variations on the Big Lie, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s take the one Donald Trump repeated often, which was outrageous and convincing enough to gather thousands of his followers for a “wild” protest In D.C., leading to the insurrection at the Capitol.

Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” began to use the term “Big Lie” after the January 6 insurrection. “The idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie,” he told CNN in an interview. “It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it.”

In other words, using our falsehood and conspiracy toolkit, Trump’s followers would have to first believe there was a stolen election (through a campaign of putting false evidence before their eyes, having them form an emotional attachment to the idea of a stolen election, and repeating that false claim repeatedly). Then, because it’s such a momentous lie, it needs a conspiracy to fuel it (which must be massive, done by unknown bad actors, and identifiable via a pattern).

Trump’s Big Lie conspiracy checks all the boxes. He and his campaign trotted out false and discredited claims as evidence for his base to see. They claimed that their beloved president was being robbed and America itself was being overthrown in order to raise the emotional stakes. Then they put that claim on repeat for months across social media and right wing networks like Fox and OAN. 

As for the conspiracy, given how many states needed to be flipped, it was portrayed as a massive effort by Democratic operatives, working with unnamed others (here, corrupt election officials) who had somehow caused votes to switch using secret software in Dominion Voting Systems machines. Their actions followed a pattern around the country that election denialists found irresistible, including large surges of Democratic votes in the wee hours of the morning and mostly African American election workers—both of which are consistent with elections in the past but are rendered nefarious out of context.

Take, for example, the Trump Campaign’s frequent reference to a videotape that supposedly showed election workers in Fulton County pulling “suitcases full of ballots” out from under tables. The video, which had circulated on social media and was seen by millions, had been selectively edited. A longer review of the full tape showed those same election workers had first put uncounted ballots beneath the table the before and had pulled the same ballots out to begin counting them later. But most of the president’s followers only saw the edited video, which was played again and again to drill home the idea that something was very wrong when in fact nothing at all ever was.

Even though he knew the videotape showed nothing untoward, Rudy Giuliani cited the video as evidence of election fraud at a hearing before Georgia legislators. To increase the emotional tug around it, he personally disparaged the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shae Moss, using racist tropes in saying that they had been “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine … to be used to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” (Giuliani has since been found personally liable for defamation of the two women.)

All of the other election conspiracy claims were similarly debunked, but not before they spread out to the GOP electorate via Fox News and OAN, both of which were sued by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, both of which were deliberately falsely libeled. But there were so many false claims that when any one of them was disproven, there were always more claims to cite as evidence. Never mind that they were all definitively debunked; the existence of so many led GOP voters to believe that there must be something very wrong. That sense persists today among the party faithful, with nearly 70 percent still believing Biden’s election was illegitimate.

Conspiracy Two: The “Biden crime family”

The “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy asserts that Joe Biden, while Vice President, was accepting millions in bribes arranged through business dealings by his son Hunter with officials in places like Ukraine and China. 

There is little doubt that Hunter Biden got himself into many personally lucrative “consulting” gigs by trading on his family name and supposed connections, in much the same way Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump did. It’s unseemly and unethical, but not illegal unless the money was paid in exchange for actions by or the influence of government officials, in this case supposedly Joe Biden. That would be outright bribery and corruption.

But to get to such a politically explosive and potentially campaign-ending conclusion, Congressional investigators such as Rep. James Comer (R-KY) would need solid evidence that there was a transfer of money to Biden and some actual corrupt action that followed.

House GOP investigators don’t have this evidence, and they haven’t gotten any closer despite an investigation into Hunter Biden that has gone on for some five years. 

So instead, they promote a classic conspiracy that again checks all the boxes. They produce supposed text messages from Hunter Biden’s laptop and backup for their supporters to see. They intermix the narrative with pornography and drug use from Hunter’s private videos to provoke an emotional negative reaction. Then networks like Fox talk about Hunter Biden on repeat, even though he is a private citizen and not running for any office, nor holding any government position. 

Once the false claim that the President must be as corrupt as his son is accepted, they then allege a massive conspiracy to funnel money to Joe Biden that involves unknown others, such as foreign actors and governments, who somehow transfer money that flows upward to Joe Biden. They suggest that personal phone calls that Hunter made to his father while his business associates were with him in the room were part of a pattern that must mean Joe is in on it.

All this complex narrative shrouds is a much simpler explanation: Hunter Biden traded on his family name to land cushy consulting gigs, then he called his father and put him on speaker to say hello, just to prove that he still was in good with him—even though Joe Biden never talked about any actual business. As a loving father who had already lost one son, Joe Biden was willing to take Hunter’s many calls, given his son’s troubled history with drug addiction. This version, by the way, aligns wholly with the testimony of the GOP’s “star witness” Devon Archer.

To confuse the American public, GOP leaders, even so-called “moderate” members of the party, routinely recite a litany that suggests that there must be something wrong, fueling a conspiracy around a non-existent bribery scheme. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), for example, recently said this on ABC This Week:

The facts are everywhere. There are text messages. There are emails. There are witnesses. There are whistleblowers. There are meetings. There are phone calls. There are dinners. And you can’t say, “Hey, there’s smoke, we’re not going to follow the fire.”

What there isn’t, however, is any actual evidence. What there is plenty of is innuendo and inference, which Republicans are hoping amounts to the public believing there is some kind of crime or malfeasance. Right now, all they have is smoke—and a lot of mirrors.

Conspiracy Three: Election interference

This third conspiracy receives a lot less attention and pushback, even though it is as pernicious and damaging to our system as any other big, unproven claim. Ever since he first announced his presidential candidacy in late 2022, and in response Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith to investigate his potentially criminal behavior, Donald Trump has been crying “election interference.” 

The game he is playing is rather simple. Because he now is a candidate for office, whenever any prosecutor seeks to hold him accountable, it must be not because he actually committed any crime, but because they want to prevent him from regaining the White House. 

But taken to its logical extreme, this is nonsensical. It would permit any politician to avoid legal consequences and prosecution simply by running for office. Hunter Biden, for example, could declare he’s now a candidate in the GOP primary and demand all prosecutions be shut down. You can imagine the outcry from the right.

Still, Trump has managed to convince a large sector of American society, including most Republicans, that the charges against him are politically motivated. He has done this even though the Special Counsel’s work is independent, and even though the White House has steered far clear of any involvement either in the Justice Department’s work or more specifically in Jack Smith’s investigation and cases.

And to Trump, even state prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, who are pursuing local criminal cases against Trump (and 18 others in the case of the RICO conspiracy case in Georgia), are somehow part of a larger “get Trump” conspiracy.

How does Trump get so many to believe that this is all just “election interference” Let’s apply the criteria from above again and see how it fits.

Americans see Trump’s false claims in his social media posts about being the victim of a Democratic “witch hunt.” His followers rally emotionally around him as their persecuted leader, especially as he invokes racial tropes against the Black prosecutors and judges. Trump’s poll numbers within his party in fact went way up after the first indictment and have stayed high ever since. Then, nearly every day, Trump, Fox and right wing media outlets repeat that misleading claim that the “Biden Administration” is behind the charges, even though it’s the Special Counsel or local prosecutors acting independently.

Once enough people believe the false claim, it can be blown up into a conspiracy. After all, in order for Trump to have four different criminal cases arrayed against him with 91 counts, there must be a massive and coordinated operation to get him. The people behind it include unknown others like George Soros. Even Jack Smith must be highly partisan because his wife once produced a film about Michelle Obama! And as the indictments pile up, a pattern emerges. Trump is being tried in cities like D.C., Atlanta and New York City, places where he won’t be able to get a fair trial! And somehow these court dates fall right in the middle of primary election season next year. Conclusion? This all must be planned out and designed to take him out.

The simpler and true explanation of course is that there are 91 criminal counts because Trump is a man who has committed a lot of crimes. The shadowy actors who “behind” the charges are actually prosecutors who are doing the jobs they were hired to do. The people indicting him are ordinary citizens sitting on grand juries, and if he didn’t want to be tried in places like D.C., Atlanta and New York City, then he shouldn’t have committed crimes there. And the judges don’t really care about his campaign schedule when setting trial dates, just about scheduling around other pending criminal matters involving Trump.

Conspiracies, including massive political conspiracies, have been around for as long as politics. They are an inevitable outgrowth of vulnerabilities of the human mind, easily exploitable by those who stand to gain from them. Often, we don’t even know that we are dealing with a broad conspiracy until the poison of it has spread widely through the civic body.

Media professionals, government officials, and data scientists need to be among the first to call out conspiracies for what they are. The “Biden Crime Family,” for example, remains a narrative that goes largely unchallenged as a baseless conspiracy, other than for its lack of evidence. It is far more pernicious than that, and pointing to the lack of evidence has never stopped a conspiracy from taking root.

Indeed, it’s often that very lack of solid evidence that creates a pattern in search of a diabolical plot. That can render such conspiracies compelling to much of the public if they aren’t properly labeled and denounced.