671: Anything Can Be Anything
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaked in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Well, it's been a week of gloating, some very emphatic gloating, and I told you so's. After Robert Mueller delivered his report saying that he could not establish collusion between the president and the Russians, as you've probably seen, the president and his supporters have been saying that's right. No conspiracy with Russia. In fact, the real conspiracy is one with the Democrats and the media, hyped this Russian stuff for two years. They're gleefully circulating videos of people like this guy. You know, you have to take seriously the popular news. New York magazine, writer Jonathan Chate, who went on to MSNBC last year to connect the dots, but whether the president has basically been a secret Russian operative all the way back since 1987. That is probably not true, but it might be, and in 1987 is when he went to Moscow and he's fed it by the Russians and in towards Moscow, and then he comes back, then he starts talking about running for president for the first time, and then he starts talking for the first time about how our allies are a bunch of freeloaders and we should kick him to the curb. It's more or less a Fox News Republican Party talking point now that the fact that there even was a Mueller investigation, the fact that it even occurred was a result of a deep state media lead Obama-Hillary FBI conspiracy. Here's a president Trump described it this week to Sean Hannity. You look at how did this start? How did it start? You had dirty cops, you had people that are bad FBI folks. I know so many, they're incredible people, but at the top, they were not clean to put it mildly. Then the money that was spent, the millions and millions on the phony dossier and paid for by Hillary Clinton and paid for by the Democrats and the DNC, it's hard to believe. If you wrote this as a novel, nobody would buy it, it would be a failure because it would be too unbelievable. Of course, there's no surprise that the president has spun the Mueller report into a conspiracy theory of his own because he's peddled lots of conspiracy theories from the idea that George Soros is funding the caravans all the way back to birtherism. Joe Jusinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories and the people who believe them, says this is actually an unusual thing about today. It used to be people with no power in this country, who are the ones pushing conspiracy theories. Now it's the president of the United States doing it, all the time. Jusinski says it from the start, it seems like Donald Trump identified conspiracy-minded voters as a possible constituency. So when he got into the Republican primary, there was 25 other candidates vying for Republican votes. He went after the underserved market of Republicans, which were conspiracy-minded Republicans but he keeps them motivated and he's got to keep going with this. He's dancing with the one who brought him to the prom. In fact, one of my co-workers, Zoe Chase, went to a couple of Trump rallies this fall in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Fort Wayne, Indiana and she found lots of people who believed in a deep state and in other conspiracies.
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