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On Monday, US President Donald Trump used a by-turns bizarre and inflammatory interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham. He repeated various falsehoods and to push a vague conspiracy theory regarding shadowy people allegedly pulling Joe Biden’s strings. Trump claimed in a discussion about Joe Biden that his opponent was under someone else’s thumb. He said, “He’s not controlling anything. Ingraham asked, “Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials”? President Trump replied, “People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. People that are”. Ingraham pressed him for further details and said, “What does that mean? That sounds like a conspiracy theory, dark shadows, what is that”? President said, “People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets, they’re people that are controlling the streets”.

President Trump added, “I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation right now. But they came from a certain city, and this person was coming to the Republican National Convention, and there were like seven people on the plane like this person, and there were a lot of people were on the plane to do big damage”. He also suggested that riots and Black Lives Matter protests were being funded by some very stupid rich people who do not realize that if their thing succeeded, they will be thrown to the wolves. Point to be noted that the conspiracy theory as expounded by Trump tracks closely with a range of viral posts from this summer that warned of planes and buses full of Antifa, descending on American cities to attack their residents. It is noteworthy that the misinformation posts have been chronicled by Marty Kelley.

Trump’s dark vision appears to echo QAnon, a sprawling conspiracy theory movement. President hasn’t endorsed the theory, but when asked about it at a recent White House press conference he said he liked its followers to the extent they supported him. The Ingraham interview as a whole has been received by the president’s critics as another in a series of disastrous sit-downs with usually sympathetic Fox News hosts who have given him space to expound at length on slippery, false, or insubstantial claims. Fletcher School professor Daniel W. Drezner compared Trump to his opponent. Ingraham pointed to a dogged Trump supporter who takes a harsh law-and-order line on the Black Lives Matter protests that have seen rioting and violence between both protesters and police.