I have the same opinion about Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Ten years ago I thought of Republicans as just people who had different philosophies about the role of government. I've always been a pretty liberal person, but if someone is in favor of lower taxes and fewer government services, then we can agree to disagree. Fast forward to now, and the Republican party has mostly degenerated into a cult about the blind worship of one man, and I don't want to be friends with someone who is openly part of a cult. I cannot shake the fact that I feel like something must be wrong with someone who supports Trump. Are they racist? Sexist? Do they believe in conspiracy theories?
I can relate to this so much and part of the reason I feel it so much is because I have, as I've touched upon, a Trump-supporting family. Hell, I think I even have a cousin who is a QAnon nut.
And based on what I've seen, and this came to light just before Donald Trump got impeached the first time, it's pretty clear that, based on my observations,
lots (maybe not all, but a significant amount nonetheless) of Trump supporters
do indeed believe in conspiracy theories. The reason why I mention the lead-up to Donald Trump's first impeachment in 2019 is when I noticed this is because, as we know, the whole reason Trump was impeached the first time is because it was revealed in September 2019 that the previous July, Donald Trump had cajoled the Ukrainian government under its president (who is still in office now, unsurprising since this was literally less than two years ago), Volodymyr Zelensky, to do a bogus investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden-and it's quite obvious why President Trump did this in 2019, because Joe Biden was running for the Democratic nomination (he had only launched his presidential campaign three months earlier, in April), and obviously Donald Trump was looking to denigrate Biden's campaign to benefit his own, as Trump was running for re-election and the odds heavily were that Biden would be Donald Trump's challenger (and obviously he was), as Joe Biden had been vice president, under Barack Obama.
Mentioning the matters that led to Trump's first impeachment, the thing was (and this shows the general insanity of it all that was going on at the time during the Trump administration) that
Donald Trump's desired investigation, with Rudy Giuliani at its helm (as Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, was Trump's attorney)
, was centered around a conspiracy theory involving the Bidens that allegedly Joe Biden, as vice president, had done actions from 2014 to 2016 to first, in April 2014, get his son Hunter a job, and then get prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired slightly less than two years later in March of 2016 as allegedly Shokin was investigating Hunter Biden and the company he worked for, Burisma Holdings-even though, one, there's no proof that Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma, and second of all, by early 2016, groups such as the United Nations and the European Union had even heavily criticized Shokin for being complicit heavily in the current Ukrainian problem of much political corruption, which is not just ongoing in Ukraine, but is and has been in much of Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, in former Soviet countries. What I thought was insane-and shocked me (particularly about Trump-supporting members of my family)-about this defense used ahead of and during Donald Trump's first impeachment wasn't just the fact that it centered around a conspiracy theory (and thus, for all practical purposes, yes,
a conspiracy theory got a President of the United States impeached, go figure), but also the fact that
this very same conspiracy theory involving Joe and Hunter Biden literally was used as Trump's defense in his first impeachment, and you had Republican members of Congress, such as Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy use this Biden conspiracy theory as a way to defend Donald Trump and his actions.
(Just as a note, what Democrats were saying about Trump's actions, as well as those of Giuliani, in terms of what happened with the Ukrainian government, have recently been confirmed by the press, and have even gotten Rudy Giuliani's residence in New York raided by prosecutors. Giuliani himself went to Ukraine in 2019 to literally get this "dirt" on the Bidens.)
Of course, and particularly unsurprisingly as the Senate had a GOP majority at the time, Donald Trump got acquitted in his first impeachment. Mitt Romney was the only Republican Senator to favor Trump's conviction (on the contempt of Congress charge, which was
very much valid, the Trump administration tried everything it could to denigrate the impeachment inquiry from September to December of 2019), and no Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump the first time either. In fact, two Democrats actually voted not to (Collin Peterson and Jeff Van Drew, although Van Drew soon afterward ended up switching parties to the GOP), and Tulsi Gabbard voted present. Nonetheless, my point here is that
I was literally shocked at the nonchalant response from Republicans towards what it was revealed Donald Trump had done in July 2019 (and arguably there was a similar response from many Democrats as well)
-not only had Trump literally asked Ukraine for a literal quid pro quo that would violate the Emoluments Clause (which says that Presidents of the United States cannot seek favor from foreign countries, as it was written by James Madison)
, but this was also a blatant effort to get dirt on and undermine the opposing side to the incumbent president's benefit-something that can only be compared to Watergate with Richard Nixon. (And, of course, Donald Trump had many comparisons made to Nixon, in regard to Richard Nixon's paranoia, while he was in office)
I'm not sure if I'm alone on this or not, but while I know in many ways Donald Trump's campaigns and presidency damaged views of the Republican Party, but in all honesty, the circumstances that led to Trump getting impeached the first time only did even more damage to my view of the GOP during this time in late 2019, as I couldn't respect members of a political party that literally defended dirty, under-the-table deeds to get advantages in a presidential election that, like I said, only can be matched by Watergate in my opinion in terms of awfulness of the deed. Mentioning how Nixon had tons of political paranoia after things such as losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election, and narrowly winning the 1968 presidential election, while I know Richard Nixon didn't order the break-in at the Watergate complex, obviously the break-in in 1972 was done to appease that paranoia-and clearly, Trump had similar paranoia about Joe Biden becoming the Democratic nominee and defeating him (both of which later happened). The fact that a literal
conspiracy theory was used to defend Donald Trump's actions towards the Ukrainian government only was salt on the wounds.
Just to note, I should still say that I know conspiracy theories have been a problem on the American right for some time before 2019. As I said, Trump himself literally propagated the birther conspiracy theory in 2011 and 2012 against Barack Obama when Obama was still president. Conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate (which QAnon later spurned off from in 2017) were propagated online in many right-wing areas during the 2016 election, and in fact, a month after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the election, there was a shooting at the Comet pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that had been the center of the conspiracy theory from the 2016 election. Arguably, with Vince Foster's suicide in 1993 during the first year of the Clinton administration (during the administration of Bill Clinton), the Clinton era represented when the conspiracy theories began being peddled so much by the right, and it never stopped. It was basically the right's way of opposing Bill Clinton, and in my opinion, it likely had to do with how the Republicans had so much power up until Democrat Bill Clinton was first elected in the 1992 election-before Clinton's presidency, the Republicans had the White House for 20 out of 24 years, barring only Jimmy Carter's single four-year term. Before Carter was in office, of course, the GOP had control of the White House for eight years under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and after the Carter administration, they had it for twelve years under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. This meant that for 20 out of the 24 years from 1969 to 1993, Republicans controlled the White House under either Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or Bush-again, only barring the term Jimmy Carter served from 1977 to 1981.
The point I was making, however, about the Ukraine scandal and Donald Trump's first impeachment is that to me, it highlighted the exact extent of the willingness American conservatives had to believe conspiracy theories, and it's when I truly realized that the belief in them is
far more common among conservatives than among liberals or progressives. And it wouldn't be long after Trump got impeached the first time and then he was acquitted that time too that I realized the commonality of conspiracy theories on the right-as the coronavirus pandemic began (and still lingers on), right-wingers have perpetuated so many conspiracy theories about the virus (yet ironically at the same time haven't taken it seriously, being resistant to things such as masks and the vaccine), and 2020 during the year (particularly as it was an election year) also exposed how common on the US right QAnon sympathies are-especially as the 2020 elections led to the elections of two QAnon adherents to the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. And, like I said,
these QAnon nuts stormed our Capitol building on January 6 after Donald Trump literally baited them to do so and had kept lying for two months straight that a re-election victory had been "stolen" from him, and that is what would get Trump impeached a second time. Arguably, if perhaps to a lesser degree, you can say that a conspiracy theory also led to Donald Trump's second impeachment as well.
Now these nuts believe that Trump will be reinstated as president this August... And some reports have stated that QAnon adherents
might get violent as time goes on given the reality of Joe Biden's presidency and how these conspiracies have next-to-no chance of coming true.
And that's what l like also about my friends is how we respect each other about our beliefs and opinions.
