According to Amanda Marcotte, Trump isn't the feckless blockhead his White House aides imply that he is. His long-standing habit of purveying conspiracy-theorist crap is not a manifestation of gullibility, but malice. I think she's correct.
'Does Donald Trump really believe all those conspiracy theories? Depends what you mean by "believe"'
Lies come more easily to Trump than the truth, it seems. That's why the simplest explanation for his tendency toward insane conspiracy theories is not that he's actually duped by the nonsense he spouts, but that he's trying to dupe his followers, in the same way he spent his career duping customers, charities and contractors. Trump's greatest and perhaps only real pleasure in life is getting one over on someone else. So when he spreads conspiracy theories, such as that Hillary Clinton had his friend Jeffrey Epstein murdered, or that he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to widespread voter fraud, the safe bet is that he knows it's not true and he's just trying to bamboozle his gullible followers, whom he holds in obvious contempt.
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On Monday morning, the White House reporting team of Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times published an article pushing the idea that Trump isn't a liar so much as he's an idiot.
"President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was 'completely debunked' long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday," they write in a piece that finally puts a name — former homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert — to the steady stream of accusations of Trump's terminal stupidity flowing from White House aides to the Times.
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The New York Times team clearly prefers the theory that Trump is a dupe rather than a deceiver. They write that "former [White House] aides said separately on Sunday that the president had a particular weakness for conspiracy theories involving Ukraine," and emphasize that Trump prefers to hear from people who are peddling such theories instead of those who are sharing actual evidence gathered by intelligence services.
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It may seem weird to argue that Trump-the-moron is a narrative that benefits the president, but in fact that works for him — and especially the people under him — better than the narrative that he knows exactly what he's doing. Stupidity removes considerable moral culpability from both Trump and his advisers.
It allows the aides to portray themselves as good people who are just trying to manage an irrational boss, rather than people who are knowingly covering for a criminal, which is what their actual actions (such as illegally concealing his conversations with foreign leaders) would suggest. It allows Republican politicians, pundits and voters to tell themselves that Trump is a well-meaning guy who should be forgiven his peccadilloes, since he's just too dumb to know better.
In reality, there are strong indications that Trump is aware that the conspiracy theories he spouts are false and that he understands that when he asks other people — whether that's foreign heads of state, his own lawyers or White House aides — to produce "evidence," he's actually asking them to concoct false evidence on his behalf.
