The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

President Trump said on Monday that he “had nothing to do with” a depiction of himself as the pope that was shared on his and White House social media accounts over the weekend, distancing himself from the apparently A.I.-generated image that has agitated Catholics.

“I had nothing to do with it,” Mr. Trump said while taking questions in the Oval Office. “Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

Mr. Trump, responding to a question about Catholics who are displeased with the image of him dressed in white papal robes and a ceremonial headdress, also attempted to downplay the mounting criticism.

“They can’t take a joke,” Mr. Trump said, quickly telling the reporter, “You don’t mean the Catholics; you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it.”

But Catholics across the country, including a prominent American cardinal, have suggested the image is offensive, especially as they mourn the death of Pope Francis. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, in Rome for the papal conclave, said when asked about the image on Sunday that he hoped it was not the president’s doing.

“I hope he didn’t have anything to do with that,” Cardinal Dolan said. Asked if he was offended by it, the cardinal demurred but called the image a “brutta figura,” meaning it had made a bad impression.

While the president insisted he did not know about the image of himself as pope, it was posted by the White House on X and by his own Truth Social account, which has shared several apparently A.I.-generated images.

Quote:

President Trump said on Monday that he “had nothing to do with” a depiction of himself as the pope that was shared on his and White House social media accounts over the weekend, distancing himself from the apparently A.I.-generated image that has agitated Catholics.

I'll rate that as somewhere between "fat chance" and "slim chance".

“They can’t take a joke,” Mr. Trump said

On his social media feed yesterday evening, President Donald J. Trump announced he was “directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders…. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

No one is reopening the island of Alcatraz as a federal prison. Officials closed it in 1963, after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to operate: more than three times as expensive as any other federal prison. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sites of the National Park Service, located as it is in San Francisco Bay, easily accessible by ferry.

It feels rather as if Trump is throwing any strong words he can at the wall to distract from a series of news stories that are not going his way.

One of those stories is that Trump’s popularity is falling in rural areas, which make up his base. That popularity is unlikely to rebound quickly, as rural areas are being hardest hit by the administration’s cuts. It’s possible Trump hopes that throwing the word “Alcatraz” in all caps at those voters will remind them that he is supposed to be the president who will crack down on the immigrants he insists are dangerous criminals.

But seven journalists from the Washington Post reported yesterday that many of the men rendered from the U.S. to El Salvador were in the U.S. legally and were complying with U.S. immigration rules. Furthermore, although the Trump administration said it had to send the men to El Salvador because Venezuela would not take them back, the journalists reported that Venezuela refused the transfer only after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s proclamation said that property belonging to those he deems enemies is subject to “seizure and forfeiture,” and Venezuela was not willing to send planes under those circumstances.

Since then, the Washington Post journalists report, Venezuela has accepted at least two deportation flights a week.

When asked about the initial flights to El Salvador, the White House fell back on the argument that rendering the migrants to El Salvador was Trump’s prerogative under the president’s power to manage foreign affairs, a prerogative the Supreme Court protected in its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision saying that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official acts. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Washington Post journalists the administration would not “detail counterterrorism operations and foreign policy negotiations with foreign countries for the press.”

Also commanding attention these days is the corruption in the Trump administration, centering around Trump and the Trump family. In The Times yesterday, Dominic Lawson recalled that Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, wrote that Trump admired Russian president Vladimir Putin primarily for his ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company—like the Trump Organisation, in fact.” Lawson observed that Trump was not able fully to realize that dream in his first term, but “now he is indeed running the U.S. government as an extended arm of the Trump Organisation.”

There is the easy-to-understand corruption, like Trump’s exempting the products of his big-oil donors from tariffs, slashing the division of the Internal Revenue Service that audits high-earning individuals and corporations, or offering businessmen a one-on-one meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, or a group dinner for $1 million.

Then there is the more complicated corruption involving business deals with foreign governments. The Constitution spells out that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept…any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is a profit, fee, salary, or advantage.

On January 10, 2025, shortly before the start of his second term, Judd Legum of Popular Information explains today, Trump simply released an “ethics agreement” that prohibited the Trump Organization from making deals with foreign governments. Already, Legum reports, the Trump Organization has violated that agreement. Last Thursday it cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.

And then there is the massive corruption of the Trump family’s involvement in cryptocurrency. As Lawson points out, the Trumps control World Liberty Financial, which has its own cryptocurrency, $WLFI. Foreign nationals who are barred from donations to American political campaigns have invested in that coin. One of them is China-born billionaire Justin Sun, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission when Trump took office, bought $75 million in the coins, and then successfully lobbied for a pause in the SEC case to negotiate a settlement.

World Liberty Financial also produces a different cryptocurrency: USD1, which is known as a “stablecoin” because it is pegged to the dollar. Last Thursday, May 1, a founder of World Liberty Financial announced that an investment firm backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates would use USD1 to complete a $2 billion deal with Binance.

Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. It is monitored by the U.S. government because in 2023 it admitted to money laundering. Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, has asked Trump for a presidential pardon.

As David Yaffe-Bellany reported in the New York Times, investors deposit money in stablecoins because their value is pegged to a state-backed currency and thus fluctuates very little. The stablecoin owner makes money by using that deposit to invest for returns that the stablecoin owner then keeps. Yaffe-Bellany notes that although the details of the UAE–World Liberty Financial deal are opaque, “it appears that…World Liberty now has $2 billion in deposits to invest. Those funds alone could generate tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.”

Yaffe-Bellany also notes that the partnership signals to investors around the world that working with the Trump-associated company can pay off.

The $WLFI and USD1 coins are separate from the $TRUMP memecoin that the president launched on January 17, 2025, just before he took office, and which the Financial Times estimates had netted about $350 million by early March. By late April it had fallen 88% from its high. Trump then offered the top 220 holders of the coin an “intimate private dinner” with the president, bumping up sales and making an estimated $900,000 in trading fees.

Trump is also getting hammered on his tariffs, and his frustration is showing. The president appears to like monkeying with tariffs because, unless Republicans take back Congress’s power to manage tariffs, he can just make a decree and watch the world jump. But the economic effects have shocked Americans. That shock is encapsulated in the news beginning to sink in that toys are highly dependent on trade with China: 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. come from there. Ninety-six percent of U.S. toy manufacturers are small businesses, highly dependent on supply chains from other countries.

Christmas orders should already be underway, but because of the tariffs, they are not. Trump has taken to arguing that girls need fewer dolls. Representative David Joyce (R-OH) acknowledged this morning on CNN that Christmas trade is already slowing down, but added: “I think American people will understand that because American people understand shared sacrifice.”

Americans who didn’t realize they were going to be asked to sacrifice—Trump promised that foreign countries would pay for tariffs, after all—have been pushing back against the tariffs. Apparently angry at being asked how trade negotiations are going, Trump last night told reporters on Air Force One: “At the end of this, I'll set my own deals because I set the deal. They don't set the deal. I set the deal. They've been ripping us off for years. I set the deal.... I'm going to be setting the deal. I'll be setting the tariff.”

Last night, in a social media post, Trump announced that foreign-made films are a national security threat and said he would institute “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Today the White House walked the announcement back.

And then there is the Signal scandal, which got even worse yesterday when Joseph Cox and Micah Lee of 404 Media reported that a hacker was able to breach the TeleMessage app administration officials have been using in about 15–20 minutes. TeleMessage is a clone of Signal that has the additional ability to archive messages. The hacker retrieved messages, usernames and passwords, and data related to Customs and Border Protection and banking institutions. The hacker did not retrieve all it was possible to see, but could have done so, making the point that the system is not secure. This afternoon the company that owns TeleMessage announced it was suspending service.

Today, likely reacting to voter sentiment and looking to 2028, Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would not challenge Democratic senator Jon Ossoff for Ossoff’s seat in 2026.

Also today, at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies.... Nobody's ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we're going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it's gonna be very interesting. We'll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it's a big hulk that's sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it's sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It's sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it's got a lot of it's got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point.”

People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.

A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.

Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.

“The real problem with the ideas and the communication of conspiracy theories is when they get evinced by people with the power to act on them,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “If some guy, somewhere, thinks the Earth is flat, the answer is ‘So what?’ But when people in power have those beliefs, it becomes a serious issue.”

He added: “You can wind up harming many, many people over a fantasy.”

Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, said in a statement that the mainstream media “has tried and failed to paint President Trump as extreme for his entire political career” and that his agenda was “common sense.”

Debunked narratives about election fraud and vaccines have proliferated in national discourse over the past five years. A pro-Trump movement known as QAnon, which makes outlandish claims that there is a global sex-trafficking operation backed by the so-called deep state, was found at one point to be as popular in the United States as some major religions.

But the conspiracy theories now graduating into the mainstream were, until recently, far more marginal. And the people voicing them are growing more influential.

Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been called the “unelected co-president,” have repeatedly suggested this year, without any evidence and against the assurances of current and former Treasury secretaries, that the Fort Knox gold reserves may have been stolen.

Anna Paulina Luna, a second-term Republican representative from Florida whom Mr. Trump endorsed, has said she believes that two shooters were involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy — a conclusion that past inquiries into the assassination and the release of 64,000 related documents in March have not proved. Ms. Luna is now heading a task force established to examine the “declassification of federal secrets” and has pledged to investigate topics that have long preoccupied conspiracy theorists, including so-called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the Covid-19 pandemic, files related to 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein’s client list (a recent document dump related to the disgraced financier revealed little).

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — a Georgia Republican known for voicing conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, school shootings and wildfires started by Jews wielding space lasers — is in her third term. In the midst of two devastating hurricanes this fall, she posted online that “they can control the weather,” nodding to a false narrative suggesting that the government can manifest storms.

Four years ago, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader at the time, condemned the sorts of “loony lies and conspiracy theories” that Ms. Greene embraced as a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” She is now considering either a Senate or a governor bid. When contacted by a reporter, a spokesman for the congresswoman said his only comment was that the reporter was “insane.”

Outlandish theories are being enabled and rewarded by the online ecosystem, said Cynthia S. Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she runs the Dispute Resolution Research Center. Social media platforms, she said, sort people into echo chambers, facilitate the production of convincingly sleek posts and use engagement metrics to encourage content that provokes a reaction.

Add in a chaotic news cycle, filled with wars, natural disasters, economic turmoil and other anxiety-inducing features, and conspiracy theories become even more appealing because they seem to explain inexplicable things, experts said.

“A lot of people in authority know that this rhetoric is powerful — it is a way to stoke uncertainty and then say, ‘Hey, if you listen to me, I can help you with your uncertainty and make sure that you and your group are going to be OK,’” Dr. Wang said. “That’s really comforting.”

Politicians understand that conspiracy theories are “what scratches our collective psychic itch” at the moment, said John Llewellyn, an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University who studies urban legends and rhetoric. Repeating such narratives, and promising to act on them, enables a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand, like performing a card trick with the right hand to misdirect from what is happening with the left, he said.

Pursuing policy action on nonexistent dangers of chemtrails, for example, allows officials to deliver “symbolic satisfaction that doesn’t require any tax increases or wrestling with health care challenges or otherwise solve any of the real and emergent problems in our society,” Mr. Llewellyn said.

The wild narratives are causing real-world trouble.

The correlation between support for political violence and the tendency to classify events and circumstances as results of conspiracies tripled in magnitude from 2012 to 2022, according to an essay published in December by several researchers, including Dr. Uscinski of the University of Miami. The researchers theorized that the surge could have been caused by a steady rise in polarization, a decline in trust in institutions or Mr. Trump’s conspiratorial and violent language.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank, identified a rash of violent incidents last year linked to perpetrators influenced by conspiracy theories about chemtrails, 9/11, elections, the pandemic and more. One was a man who — fueled by rage against the government, immigrants, the gay community and the Black Lives Matter movement, according to prosecutors — killed and then beheaded his father, a former federal employee.

“For radicalized individuals, whose worldviews are warped by these theories and who are already primed to commit violence, political developments and other events have the potential to serve as catalysts to action,” researchers wrote.

A feedback loop of conspiracy theories has formed at every level of American government, according to watchdog groups. Efforts to break the chain are weakening: Misinformation and disinformation researchers have faced years of political pressure, including a decision by the National Science Foundation last month to terminate grants related to research in the field.

What other topics are going from shunned to the spotlight? Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left-wing advocacy group that monitors misinformation, said he was “pretty bullish on demons as the next big one.”

Mr. Trump referred to “demonic forces” on the campaign trail and called Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago on Election Day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, posted a YouTube video claiming he had been attacked in the night “by a demon or by something unseen.” Dan Bongino, a right-wing pundit and podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on his show that “demon energy is real.”

“It’s no longer an abstraction — it’s about straight-up demons,” Mr. Carusone said. “The fever swamps are all of our reality right now.”