Opinion - Consumed by his own conspiracy theories: The downfall of Donald Trump

Pundits spent the days in the run-up to Donald Trump’s first debate with Kamala Harris trying their best to predict which Trump would show up on Tuesday night. Few could have predicted the dizzying variety of unhinged rants the former president would put on display — including one very memorable line about cats.

In one of the most humiliating moments of his political career, Trump amplified a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been caught stealing and eating local pets.

When moderator David Muir fact-checked this lie with a statement from Springfield city officials, Trump went into full-on meltdown mode. “I’ve seen people on television! The people on television saying ‘my dog has been taken and used for food!’” he barked.

That moment was a victory for the small circle of right-wing Internet weirdos who first advanced Trump’s pet-eating hoax. For the millions of Americans who don’t live their lives online, it seemed like the former president had finally lost his mind.

Trump’s very public breakdown on the debate stage is just the latest example of how the far-right social media influencer sphere has permeated every part of the Republican political machine. It’s easy to trace the growth of the cat-eating hoax from terminally online provocateurs like Ian Miles Cheong directly to campaign speeches by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. But playing to such a small base of Trump’s online superfans comes at the cost of alienating swing-state voters who aren’t plugged in to the right’s constant stream of online grievances.

It’s no secret that Team Trump often takes its cues from the social media trolls who churn out pro-Trump propaganda on a nearly hourly basis. In recent weeks Trump has openly courted right-wing social media influencers through multiple podcast and streaming appearances, including YouTuber Adin Ross and bro-culture comedian Theo Von. But those audiences are already in the tank for Trump — it’s hard to imagine many Harris-curious voters listening to Von or turning to Cheong or to alleged Russian asset Tim Pool.

In a sense, Trump’s recent pivot to cater almost exclusively to his very online right-wing base is a safety blanket for a campaign deeply rattled by the departure of Joe Biden from the race and the fast rise of Harris in his place. Trump knows he won’t face tough questions from his most loyal fans, and the softball interviews and fawning praise provide him with the comforting illusion of hitting a grand slam with every half-baked response.

But there’s no doubt that steeping in viral right-wing slop has turned Trump’s campaign into something of a niche experience.

Instead of using his 90 minutes of debate time to hammer Harris on, say, inflation, Trump dedicated multiple viral moments to such conspiracy theories. Trump’s rant about cat-eating won’t do anything to dispel Tim Walz’s viral claim that Republicans are simply too weird to govern. But what Americans saw on the debate stage last night might even be too weird for some of Trump’s biggest supporters. When Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller asked South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham about Trump’s performance, Graham described the debate as a “disaster” and called for all of Trump’s debate preppers to be summarily fired.

Firing up his online base may have been an effective strategy back in June, when Trump was coasting to victory over Biden. It’s an exercise in terrible strategy now that Trump is trailing Harris in key swing states and quickly losing ground in once-safe Republican strongholds like North Carolina, where Quinnipiac has Harris leading by 3 points.

If Trump hoped to show voters that he understood their most fundamental concerns, Tuesday’s debate was an embarrassing flop. Instead, most people will remember last night’s matchup as the night when Donald Trump said people were eating pets. In an election where most voters cite economic issues as their top priority, it’s tough to say where that kind of thing ranks.

Judging by Republicans’ frantic post-debate spin room work, Trump’s conspiracy mongering wasn’t the message they’d hoped to close on — but it was certainly classic Trump. Too bad it was also incoherent to anyone outside the right-wing echo chamber.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

An earlier version of this piece suggested, mistakenly, that Kamala Harris had not supported gender transition surgeries for federal prisoners. She did support this, according to reporting by CNN.

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