He sees plots everywhere. The hacking of e-mails of the American Democratic Party in 2016? A blow of the Ukrainians ... and not Russians! The dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2014? The work of his political rival Joe Biden who, using his influence as vice president of Barack Obama, would have wanted to protect his son against an investigation for corruption. These theses have been dismantled for years, but US President Donald Trump persists and signs, appearing as the chief conspirator of the United States since the beginning of the parliamentary inquiry opened after the revelations of the Ukrainian scandal.
This is not new. After all, Donald Trump built part of his 2016 campaign around fantasies: that the birth certificate of Barack Obama was false or that the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was in the pay of the "international financial powers". But this time, the US president has discussed the plots around the hacking of e-mails of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden away from the media spotlight, in the privacy of the famous telephone discussion with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenski.
From George Washington to Donald Trump
A reality largely unnoticed, so much the pressure that Donald Trump would have exercised during this call on his interlocutor to urge him to reopen an investigation on the son of Joe Biden caught the media attention. Yet, "while we could think so far that Donald Trump resorted to conspiracy theories in a purely electioneering, this phone call seems to indicate that he believes sincerely," said Michael Butter, vice director of the network Comparative analysis of conspiracy theories in Europe and specialist in American history at the University of Tübingen, Germany, contacted by France 24.
A convinced conspirator would therefore occupy the Oval Office. The idea may seem shocking so much the conspiracy pure and hard appeared until still a phenomenon confined to the darkest recesses of the Web. But "in reality, the Trump presidency is simply a step backwards, because until the second half of the twentieth century, several American presidents, even among the most respected, were convinced conspirators," says Michael Butter. This expert points out that two of the founding fathers of the United States (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, respectively 1st and 3rd presidents of the country) were convinced that the British conspired to deprive the Americans of all their civil rights. John Adams, the second president of the United States, "believed in the existence of 'illuminati' [a Bavarian secret society suspected at the time of wanting to influence the American government, Ed] and passed in 1789 the law on foreigners and sedition partly to protect themselves from this so-called danger, "says Michael Butter of the University of Tübingen. And the communist threat has spawned many conspiracy theories in Washington's ruling spheres since the October Revolution in 1917.
A real impact
While the line between mere political paranoia and conspiracy theories is often unclear, leaders such as John Adams have made political decisions based on fears stemming from unfounded theses, such as the existence of illuminati. And that's what Donald Trump does when he asks his attorney general (equivalent to the Minister of Justice), William Barr, or his vice-president, Mike Pence, to go and ask Kiev to reopen the investigation. on the activities of Joe Biden's son, even though no evidence suggests he was involved in corruption cases.
The big difference from previous periods is that, in an increasingly interconnected world, "it is possible that conspiracy theories push Donald Trump to make political choices that will have profound international consequences," notes researcher Michael Butter. In the days of John Adams or George Washington, political decisions were primarily about the national territory.
Donald Trump also refers much more openly and frequently to conspiracy theories than other US presidents, says the German expert. Blame it on the highly conflicted American political context: "He can afford to refer to it to seduce those Americans who really believe in it, because he knows that more traditional Republicans, even if they do not adhere to it, will still prefer vote for him rather than a democrat, "says Michael Butter.
If Donald Trump is, in the end, the heir of a long line of American presidents who have tasted conspiracy theories, this does not mean, however, that it does not represent a danger for democracy. Indeed, conspiracyism gradually became, from the mid-1950s, a non-grata concept at the highest level of power thanks to two factors: on the one hand, the emergence of the social sciences, which demonstrated that events were far more complex to explain than are often implicit conspiracy theories in their postulates, and second World War. "She proved that conspiracy theories, like those of the Jewish conspiracy, can lead to absolute horrors," said Michael Butter. Putting conspiracy at the center of the political debate, Donald Trump erases some of the lessons the world has learned from Nazi madness.