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Trump betrays his conspiracy-addled base
From Epstein to chemtrails, they're learning it was all a scam.
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Anyone wondering how long the patience of Donald Trump’s conspiratorial base would last now has the answer: about six months. That’s how long it took for the MAGA extremists and QAnon crackpots to get fed up with the administration, and to an extent even Trump himself, for not providing them satisfaction.
How could we blame them? This was finally their chance to get the proof that they’ve been right all along, that there really are dark conspiracies and sinister cabals manipulating events and lurking behind everything the ignorant masses take for granted. And what has this presidency, stocked with true believers, actually delivered?
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The conflict around the late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is getting the most attention, and we’ll discuss that in a moment. But it isn’t the only place where treachery is afoot. At the Environmental Protection Agency, another entry on the conspiracy theorists’ greatest hits list — chemtrails — is the subject of another administration perfidy. It shows how Trump and his aides created a problem they cannot solve.
Look, up in the sky! It’s … just a plane.
Those who watched the video EPA administrator Lee Zeldin put out last week on the subject of chemtrails initially thought the Trump administration was going to blow the lid off the conspiracy in the skies.
The agency, Zeldin said, was putting up a web page with everything the government knows about this urgent issue. He framed it with a classic conspiracy trope: “People who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified, by the media and their own government,” he claimed. But no more! “Instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as ‘baseless conspiracies,’ we’re meeting them head-on.”
One conspiracy theorist cheered. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked recently about chemtrails, and answered that he thinks the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is responsible, and he will “find out who’s doing that and hold them accountable.” Kennedy responded on X to Zeldin’s video: “Im so proud of my friend Lee Zeldin and President Donald Trump for their commitment to finally shatter the Deep State Omerta regarding the diabolical mass poisoning of our people, our communities, our waterways and farms, and our purple mountains, majesty.”
Kennedy clearly hadn’t taken a look at what the EPA actually posted. Rather than reinforce the conspiracy theory, the agency explained that when they fly through patches of cold air, “Jet aircraft form contrails under these atmospheric conditions for the same reason that you can see the exhaust from your vehicle or your own breath on a cold day.” It went on to say that chemtrails is “a term some people use to inaccurately claim that contrails resulting from routine air traffic are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather.”
Reading it, you can imagine a contrail of steam emanating from the ears of the Trump faithful who have long believed that when they look up in the sky they are seeing evidence of atmospheric mind-control. The comments on Zeldin’s tweet are full of angry reactions: “We don’t trust any of you.” “We’re just being lied to.” “Wow. Sounds like you have bought into the lie that there are no chemtrails.”
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