It turns out the Trump administration isn’t done shattering the fantasies of its most paranoid followers.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, Donald Trump has never been much of a skeptic.
Trump presaged his political career by attaching himself to the notion that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen. As a candidate, he lent credence to the notion that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich’s murder was a contract killing designed to silence him. He floated a similar theory about Bill Clinton aide Vince Foster. Trump suggested Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was smothered with a pillow. He has entertained revisionist narratives around the 9/11 attacks. He maintained that overwhelming numbers of illegal immigrant voters cost him victory in states like New Hampshire in 2016, and Dominion’s voting machines cost him the presidency in 2020. And so on.
Trump’s willingness to suspend disbelief has attracted a variety of figures with similar inclinations. From Sydney Powell to Laura Loomer to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s orbit is glutted with the credulous champions of fantastical narratives. So, it must be uncomfortable for everyone involved that the administration has recently taken a turn toward myth-busting.
I wrote yesterday about the outsize sense of betrayal overtaking the loudest factions within the MAGA ecosystem over the administration’s belated admission that there is no “Epstein list.” It should not have come as a stinging revelation that criminal investigators were not furnished with an itemized register of rich and powerful Americans who partook in a child sex trafficking ring, but that is what some within the MAGA firmament believed. And they believed it because the people they trusted within Trump’s inner circle told them it was true. The jilted MAGA faithful have earned their sense of infidelity and rebuke, even if they brought it on themselves.
It turns out the Trump administration isn’t done shattering the fantasies of its most paranoid followers.
On Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lee Zeldin published a video announcing that he had tasked his agency with compiling “everything we know” about so-called “chemtrails” — the theory that maintains powerful actors are seeding the atmosphere with chemicals to alter the weather, human behavior, or any number of other sordid objectives. Zeldin heaped scorn on the cynics who dismiss the theory off-hand, only for his agency to dismiss the theory off-hand.
The EPA document that accompanied Zeldin’s announcement attributed “chemtrail” sightings to their observers’ confusion. Those are contrails, the white paper concluded — water vapor produced as a byproduct of combustion that freezes in the upper atmosphere, leaving behind a trail of ice crystals. “The federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification,” the EPA concluded.
In addition, the infernal weather machine known as HAARP — a bugbear of conspiracist entertainers for decades — does not alter the environment, the document affirmed. It’s not even a classified program, and its “Environmental Impact Study can be viewed by the public.”
Conspiracist logic will lead its adherents to conclude that Zeldin, the EPA, and even the Trump administration writ large have been co-opted by shadowy forces invested in preserving the public’s ignorance. At least, that was the rationalization that followed the release of the few remaining classified JFK assassination files, which landed with a resounding thud with the conspiracist community. It turns out that much of that information was being withheld because it was not pertinent to the investigation — raw intelligence that led nowhere — but that would fuel paranoia if it were released to the public. That’s precisely what happened. And yet, many who hoped for confirmation of the Oliver Stone version of events were honest enough to confess their disappointment.
The disappointment of those who overinvested in unlikely sequences of events notwithstanding, these initiatives are praiseworthy. Trust in America’s governing institutions has been on the decline for years. Acts of transparency like these — particularly those that cut against the MAGA movement’s political interests — might help restore some of that lost trust.