Generally speaking, Trump does something because it benefits him personally. But I can’t see how he benefits out of supporting medical conspiracies.
He’s dumb about healthcare, as indicated by his stated belief that windmills cause cancer but orange soda cures it. But he doesn’t seem to be a believer and he gets conventional medical treatment.
The people who do believe conspiracy theories love him because he endorses their woo. But Trump has demonstrated he can pretty much say anything and his believers will agree with him. So he could just as easily declare that alternative medicine is a liberal plot and the magas would all agree.
The real issue to me is that Trump’s endorsement of medical conspiracies is killing people in his own base and that weakens his power. So what benefit is Trump getting that outweighs, in his mind, the shrinking of his base?
Trump isn’t giving his support to the medical conspiracy crowd. He never gives anyone or anything his support, or anything else. He’s accepting support from that crowd. It’s purely “if I make these meaningless mouth-noises, they’ll support me”.
MAGA, and especially its MAHA cohort are heavily into medical conspiracies relating to vaccines, cancer cures They are hiding from us, chemtrails, GMOs etc.
At best, Trump does zero to refute this nonsense; at his worst he fans the flames. He knows that’s what his base wants. They’re willing to forget his push for Covid vaccines if he supports the antivax line now.
Conspiracies are the shiny objects he dangles in front of MAGA to distract them from the economy, inflation, failing war and budget deficits. “Look, a UFO reveal!!”
Trump doesn’t care at all about American kites or the quality of American life. Much like Putin doesn’t care how many of his soldiers die in Ukraine.
As long as the masses are fighting each other over what he says from day to day and not paying attention to his shenanigans the grift can continue to roll in.
It’s a piece of utterly reprehensible calculating immoral politics. That stands out even by the standards of Trump and the GOP
Before COVID this kind of nutjobbery was not primarily associated with the GOP, there was an extreme fringe of the right who held these beliefs but they were more likely to be associated with the left or not really associated with party politics at all
During COVID Trump and the GOP realized that there was a bunch of these nutjobs out there and their votes were there for the taking. So they co-opted them knowing full well that doing so would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. They didn’t believe in this crap but they could get the votes of people who did, and it’s not like Trump believes all the other crap that has been part of the GOP’s core values historically either (which also has killed plenty of Americans) . It’s not even that many votes, but Trump has killed hundreds of thousands for them (and we’ve only started seeing the death toll).
It’s the most vile crap imaginable, even by the GOP’s standards.
Speaking of appeals to nuttery for the sake of political power, let’s not forget cowards like G.O.P. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana (a physician), who painted a target on his back by voting for Trump’s impeachment during his first term - and ever since has been groveling before the dear Leader, including casting a deciding committee vote assuring RFK Jr.'s confirmation as HHS Secretary, knowing what a medical conspiracy loon Junior was and is.
Even an increasingly demented Trump doesn’t forget challenges to his power, so he endorsed a Cassidy opponent in the upcoming primary, and it’s highly doubtful that even extreme groveling will save Cassidy’s Senate seat.
Yeah. He takes the path of least resistance in every conversation (with the caveat that for him “least resistance includes insulting anyone with a spine”).
Trump is under their control, not his. If he speaks against them, he loses votes.
That being said, ironically, as griffin1977 said, by doing so, his anti-Covid-vaccine-and-distancing stance got a lot of his voters killed. Thus losing him votes.
I disagree. Trump appointed Kennedy to a cabinet position. He had no need to do so. That has advanced medical conspiracies much further than they would have been.
And by encouraging his followers to forego real healthcare, Trump has reduced his base and weakened his political strength.
Unlike COVID, the current bad medical positions Trump is taking won’t kill people quickly. They’ll get sick and die as a result, but not at a time he needs them. He’ll be dead before most of them.
Yeah but plenty of other GOP policies it’s not e.g. Republican voters are more likely to die from lack of healthcare, or gun violence, etc. The difference is Trump had nothing to do with the GOP adopting those policies. This was Trump’s doing, and it was calculating attempt to win some votes at the expensive of a huge pile of human life.
Though this wasn’t that. Again pre-2020 I’d have associated this kind of bs far more with the liberal rich hippy elite than the Maga base. This was pure electoral calculus.
This is yet another thing MAGA will never grasp: that things done to trigger the opposing side can be mostly self-harm.
Although one rare MAGA exception, a right-wing author, did write articles claiming liberals were deliberately promoting the Covid vaccine for the specific purpose of getting MAGA folks to NOT take the vaccine and, hence, die, as an act of reverse psychology.
It really does come down to COVID. He hated the pandemic. It destroyed the economy on his watch, and people actually expected him to do things to make the situation better. But the medical CTists lined up behind him, vigorously defending every stupid thing he said, so he loves them. So long as it costs him nothing, he’s happy to let them run wild.
Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily have a lot of longstanding sincere beliefs, but he does have some (like tariffs) and he’s been pushing antivax stuff for at least18 years.