I’ve served the US government four times in national security positions. That experience made me profoundly allergic to conspiracy theories. The governments I’ve served found it hard enough to do what they sought to do, much less hide other, perhaps nefarious purposes behind official policy.
That was driven home for me long ago: I had left the Carter administration and was living in London at the time of Jimmy Carter’s failed raid to rescue the US hostages in Iran. More than one knowledgeable British colleague thought the raid had failed on purpose: they knew American politics well enough to see the domestic pressure building for action – any action.
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Yet they shared the view of Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, that a successful raid would only inflame passions throughout the region. Hence, a planned failure was the best outcome. I could only stand agog in amazement.
Now, though, conspiracy theories suffuse American politics. They are everywhere. Take the curious case of Tucker Carlson, who recently gave an interview to the New York Times in which he lamented the wreckage of Trump’s second term and apologised for his previous support. “We’ll be tormented… for a long time,” Carlson told the paper. “I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
His apology might have been cathartic. It wasn’t. Instead, it was immediately replaced by a new conspiracy theory in the minds of the MAGA faithful. In this conspiracy, everything from the Iran war to George Floyd to migration was the result of globalist or Zionist forces bent on the deliberate destruction of the US.
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Carlson’s brother, Buckley, is a former speechwriter for Donald Trump, and the two brothers recently appeared on a podcast together. Buckley summed up their shared view of US political and cultural events as a collection of dark conspiracies. “It is clearly by design,” said Buckley. “It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
Even my own conspiracy immunity has been worn down. I confess that when I saw the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner, my second thought was: this must be a Trump plot. It was simply too perfect. The shooter never got close to the president, and while there was shooting, no one was badly hurt.
Donald Trump got the opportunity, once again, to look brave and in control. And he was mercifully spared the speeches, which were bound to get his goat. Even better, he got an open stage at the press conference to, alternately, wax as statesman-like as he ever gets, heaping praise on the law enforcement, especially the Secret Service, that had saved the day, and also indulge in his customary, wildly exaggerated self-praise.
To say it again, I am not meant to entertain conspiracy theories. I have worked in a succession of government administrations overseeing questions of security policy and defence. I am meant to deal in hard facts and in the analysis of carefully gathered evidence. But I will confess now that I’m still not entirely convinced that my conspiracy theory was wrong. I suspect I am not alone.
It’s hard to see where US politics goes from here. As is often observed, it’s not just that those politics are as polarised as they’ve been since the American civil war. It’s also that the partisans, on both sides, but especially the MAGA right, regard their opponents as being morally deficient. Today in the US, the person on the other side of the argument is not just wrong. They are evil.
There are two other elements. The first is language – American political dialogue has been debased to a degree that I would have thought impossible. Trump not only takes every opportunity to demean and defame his political opponents, but he does so in barnyard language, which has sadly become normalised.
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The second element is cruelty, which has also become normalised. ICE agents murdering innocent American citizens in Minneapolis still calls forth outrage, but killing Latin American fishermen in the Caribbean sea has become just part of the Washington woodwork.
All this takes place when the administration has truly “flooded the zone,” in Steve Bannon’s phrase. New distortions, lies and conspiracies are peddled faster than they can be processed.
During Trump’s first administration, what remains of the “quality” press worked hard at fact-checking, but now it seems to have all but given up. There simply is too much to check.
I still hope that when Trump passes from the scene, cruelty as an explicit element of policy – in dealing with migrants, for instance – will pass with him. But I have less hope that the hyper-polarisation, debased dialogue and attraction to conspiracy will also disappear.
It will continue, and continue to pose the question of whether the US can remain together as a country, not only politically, but also physically.
Greg F Treverton was chair of the US National Intelligence Council. He is now professor emeritus at the University of Southern California
