Donald Trump has been the conspiracy whisperer throughout his entire public life. Even before he was president, he was convinced that the Central Park Five were guilty (they weren’t). He spent years claiming that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t). He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death may have been Democratic foul play (it wasn’t). Those are just the theories he was spouting before he got into office.
This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed the half-dozen unfounded or disproven conspiracy theories that Trump and his administration have spewed since getting into the White House. These include everything from Obama using transformer microwaves to spy on the Trump White House (Optimus Hot Pockets?); Black Lives Matter being a terrorist organization; and the Democrats running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. (also known as “pizzagate”).
Of course, all of these theories are unfounded or disproven, but they still rile up the base and keep Reddit full of traffic, so why should khaki-wearing “alt-righters” have all the fun? Now it turns out that the Trump administration may have an equally implausible conspiracy on its hands: Is the administration involved in child sex trafficking or just white nationalism? Follow me down the rabbit hole and see for yourself.
August 2017: Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks permission from the Trump administration to start destroying old files and documents relating to 11 subjects. These include reports of violence, solitary confinement, death and sexual abuse inflicted on those detained by ICE agents while still in their custody. It is still being determined how long these reports would be held before being destroyed. Two years? Twenty years? Six weeks? ICE isn’t saying. Some congressional candidates have found this policy so disturbing, they’ve begun to campaign on it.
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