This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Donald Trump may not have been the first president to believe in conspiracy theories, but he was definitely the first candidate whose election was fueled by pandering to those who do.
As his popularity soared among those on the fringe during his 2016 campaign, their internet presence became less about “questioning everything” and much more about blindly believing whatever Trump told them. Trump’s following on Reddit grew especially fast, and especially toxic. But while threads like r/TheDonald were unapologetically pro-Trump, the large subreddit r/conspiracy was ostensibly more non-partisan.
It claimed to hold a “question everything” ethos that would presumably include the new president alongside the old ones as part of the evil cabal supposedly ruling the world and funding all wars.
It didn’t actually work out that way. Claiming more than 856,000 active weekly users, r/conspiracy is one of the most important hubs of fringe discussion and research. And for years, the forum’s most popular posts were unabashedly pro-Trump. The forum was openly anti-vaccine and believed COVID-19 was a hoax. Users believed that Democrats were part of a vast occult trafficking ring, to the point of helping popularize the QAnon conspiracy theory. They believed that the media and political establishment were all hell-bent on destroying Trump, the same message Trump’s surrogates and spokespeople espoused every day on cable news and right-wing podcasts.
But in his second term, that blind loyalty has started to crack. Many of the influencers who helped rehabilitate Trump after his failed attempt to subvert the 2020 election are now openly questioning his actions and statements in ways that would have been unthinkable months ago.
The tipping point seems to be the administration’s deeply unconservative stance that people “can’t bring a gun to a protest,” in response to the disarming and shooting of Minnesota protester Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents on Jan. 24, 2026.
“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t,” an exasperated Trump told reporters outside the White House after the Pretti shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel added that “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple,” while Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have also made similar comments, with Bessent adding that he’s been to protests and “brought a billboard” rather than a firearm.
These comments sat incredibly poorly with Trump’s gun-loving supporters, given that they have been doing exactly this for decades. The internet is full of pictures of conservatives openly carrying firearms at Tea Party rallies, anti-lockdown protests, pro-gun open carry events, and of course, Jan. 6. But the administration’s seeming reversal on the Second Amendment stirred outrage beyond gun groups like the NRA and more traditional conservatives.
This time, they infuriated the conspiracy theorists who, before Trump, used to believe that federal government stormtroopers could kick down their door and take their guns away at any time. Such violent opposition to the FBI and Justice Department were once the backbone of anti-government extremism, and they were finally resurfacing as a version of their paranoid nightmare was finally coming true.
Nowhere was the backlash more apparent than on r/conspiracy, where the board seemed to turn as one against the president it had once so vocally supported. When combined with Trump’s reversals on the Jeffrey Epstein files and his constant drumbeat of launching new wars when he ran as an anti-interventionist “peace president,” it proved to be too much for many prolific users of the forum. They had no trouble saying so, either.
“We are being dragged into hell by a demonic cult,” declared the most popular post on r/conspiracy for weeks, featuring a meme with pedestrians being surveilled by drones and herded by police, one of whom declares “we sure owned the libs.”
“I can’t express how strange it is to have people going along with stuff they themselves said was evil such a short time ago. Apparently if influencers keep normalizing what’s happening they will just pretend literally anything is okay,” said the poster. And many others agreed with them. More posts with thousands of upvotes and supportive comments like “The DOJ, the FBI, and the vast majority of our elected officials knew about this to varying degrees. [Attorney General Pam] Bondi and Kash covered it up and absolutely will not bring a single client to justice.”
“Alex Pretti was murdered by authoritarian thugs,” claimed another with thousands of upvotes. Others expressed dismay at Trump’s threats to claim Greenland and backtracking on Second Amendment rights, while another exclaimed that they ran out of conspiracy theories because “they all came true.”
And Trump was at the center of it all, mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files, and veering away from once-sacrosanct conservative positions on gun ownership and states’ rights. These aren’t obscure tweets with a few likes; they are the most popular posts on what had been an almost uniformly pro-Trump, pro-MAGA, and pro-conservative message board with a huge user base. After years of pretending Trump was the one who would finally bring the vast conspiracy down, many are finally realizing that he is just as much a part of it as any other “global elite.”
Trump’s second term has seen these types of tests of faith before. Many right-wing influencers appeared to break away over tariffs in April 2025, only to come back to him almost immediately. And numerous MAGA podcasters openly attacked Trump over his massive flip flops regarding the Epstein files, as the administration wildly veered from hosting influencer gatherings to give out “phase one” of the FBI’s files on Epstein, to Trump declaring the files to be a “Democrat hoax.” Like before, most quickly came back to the fold.
Things seem different this time. Bigger influencers are reckoning with a Republican president unleashing a vast network of federal agents to brutalize American citizens, realizing it doesn’t sit well next to traditional conservatism. While Infowars head Alex Jones has been entirely supportive of ICE and of the Trump administration’s comments on guns, fellow Infowars podcaster and top-tier wellness influencer Mike Adams went off on ICE, claiming they “Hunted Down and Murdered Alex Pretti” in a late January podcast.
White nationalist podcaster Stew Peters declared that it’s not illegal to bring a gun to a protest, and pro-Trump comic and podcaster Jimmy Dore used his show to remind his large audience that “you can say people shouldn’t protest with guns, even though a staple of right-wing protests, especially during the COVID era, was showing up, not just with pistols hidden, but with huge AR-15s displayed.”
Such small cracks in the right’s devotion to Trump might seem insignificant in the long term. But the pushback against Trump’s shifting stance on guns is coming as his approval rating is dropping, and as 2026 midterm polling shows signs of a looming wipeout for the GOP. Trump might be able to survive these reversals and public floggings based on the loyalty of his following, but can other congressional Republicans? Can the slate of candidates to succeed him in 2028?
No matter how much conservatism has bent to the will of Trump over the last decade, restrictions on the Second Amendment from a Republican administration might be too much to rationalize. And as Trump’s polling slides downward, so too is his status with the conspiracy theorist community — a group of people who will have enormous sway over the future of the GOP.
Whether their ill-feelings translate into permanent abandonment is still an open question. But if it happens, it’s a sign that the coalition that got him back into power in 2024 has broken — and that nobody knows what happens next or who can pick up the pieces.
The fundamental nature of these conspiracy theory-mongers is very poor critical reasoning skills. That explains why they keep returning to Trump after he shows again and again that he’s a con man and they are rubes.
Sooner or later, Trump and his mouthpieces will come up with some nonsense that will placate them. Something like only his supporters will be allowed to have guns and will be able to use them freely, but not any of his enemies or opponents. It might be done as whispers or put out publicly and then referred to as a joke.
The fact is, these Reddit conspiracy idiots wouldn’t recognize a true conspiracy if I was right in front of them. They are driven by negative emotions which allowed them to see what they want to see and ignore what they want to ignore. With full knowledge of these people, psychology, and how to manipulate them, pulling off a conspiracy becomes simple. Get all your conspirators on the same page and blame it in advance on the people you know they hate. When it begins to fall apart, when those fools have a wait a minute moment, rinse, and repeat.
MAGA came out from under their beds to vote for him and now they are scurring back under. So good-bye and good riddance.
Some conspiracy theories have more legs than others. Some 60% of American adults believe that covid originated in a lab (and typically the Wuhan Institute of Virology). John Ratcliffe, now Director of the CIA, long advocated for the lab leak scenario, stating in 2023 that the “lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense.” Not surprisingly, he again found evidence of the lab leak under Trump 2.0. (Somewhat in form, yesterday he discontinued publication of the CIA Factbook, long a treasure trove for quick information about obscure countries). Many on the right have gone down this path, partly because of the exciting term “gain of function”, a term of art that RFK Jr and Marco Rubio love to toss around. For some reason, the natural explanation, zoonosis, of which we have many examples, just doesn’t cut it for these people. In an extractionist worldview chopping down forests and killing everything occurs without consequences.
One of the less-mentioned aspects of persecution of people, often scientists, is the harm it does to their lives and careers. In 2024, the manifest ignoramus James Comer led the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a public hearing of EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. Daszak and his colleagues, after 10 years eventually tracked down the origin of SARS in 2013. Daszak, a zoologist, lost his funding and was debarred by Congress in 2025. The general view even today is that covid was a spillover event from animals.
Sadly, the media dutifully report on lab leak theory, which became a sort of litmus test for Trump loyalty like “who really won the 2020 presidential election”. It’s phlogiston, mysterious, weightless, undetectable, but exists if you believe. Like a cult.
The entire cult and conspiracy thing is deeply sad, it has gotten many people an early death.
That said, when I read the above, I could not stop laughing. The gun thing, is what did it???! They did not notice anything earlier or any other inconsistencies? This would be a great Monty Python skit if it was not so real life and tragic right now. But I confess that it brought me to tears in laughter.
I guess we have cult against cult now.
Can’t have a conspiracy without human intervention, an ‘other’ to blame. Mother Nature just can’t compete.