Donald Trump is the Conspiracy Theorist in Chief – leader comment

Donald Trump accuses China of making Covid-19 coronavirus in a lab – contradicting both the top US intelligence agency and scientists – and claims the US media is collaborating with Beijing, calling NBC News and CNN “enemies of the people”.

The news that a Facebook page belonging to the delusional David Icke has been removed because of his promotion of conspiracy theories about Covid-19 should be welcomed by all right-thinking people. Icke does have a right to free speech, but Facebook has no obligation to convey his dangerous fantasies to a global audience.

However, there is another conspiracy theorist whose ramblings are unlikely to be removed from social media until, at the earliest, November. That’s because he is Donald Trump. The US President has form in this area as a leading proponent of the ‘Birther’ conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the US, but in Kenya.

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Even the production of Obama’s birth certificate in 2011 did not dissuade him. In 2013, Trump tweeted: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”

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Donald Trump claims to have seen evidence coronavirus ‘came from Chinese lab’

Now Trump is pushing another equally implausible fiction: that the Covid-19 coronavirus was invented in a lab in China. He has also said he thinks China’s handling of outbreak proves that its government “will do anything they can” to prevent his re-election.

His lab claim contradicts scientists who have studied the virus and also the top US spy agency, the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which said in a statement on Thursday: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”

This difference of opinion is hardly surprising, given Trump idiotically suggested a particularly gruesome way to kill yourself – injecting disinfectant – could be a treatment for Covid-19 and chose to believe Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the US elections (before, after much uproar, claiming he missed out the word “not” in the key sentence).

The mainstream US media has the unenviable task of trying to hold Trump to account for his numerous lies and inventions. He has no option but to attack, tweeting that NBC News and CNN “are going out of their way to say great things about China. They are Chinese puppets who want to do business there. They use USA airwaves to help China. The Enemy of the People!”

Yet another dangerous conspiracy theory, given a platform by social media, but don’t hold your breath for a Twitter ban.

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