Following President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump’s stumbling debate performance, rabid MAGA followers are falling into a maze of new conspiracy theories.
Politico reported Thursday that the right has deployed a new slogan derived from the claim that Biden is unfit for the presidency and that Democrats and the mainstream media have conspired for months to cover up Biden’s declining approval ratings.
“The greatest hoax in history has been exposed,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller shouted at the National Conservative Conference in Washington, DC, this week.
“Every important Democrat was involved in, knew about and covered up Biden’s cognitive impairment while allowing unnamed secret staffers to run the country.”
This theme is repeated by several MAGA figures.
“I think this will go down as another journalistic failure where they betrayed the public by interfering with Biden. [and] “It obscures the truth, which is that this man appears to be suffering from severe cognitive decline,” said Vivek Ramaswami, who ran unsuccessfully against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
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And on Tuesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity blamed a “conspiracy of Biden loyalists, liars and the national media” for the cover-up.
“The farce, cover-up, corruption and lies now officially end,” he said. “It was clear Joe was not the right man for the job, but the media mob did everything in their power to cover this up and lie about him for years.”
“Our mission is to make the case to the American people that a party so hungrier for power that it would hatch a conspiracy of this size and scale must be forcefully removed from power this November,” Miller added.
Ramaswami told Politico that the “cover-up” was just the latest example of the media colluding with Democrats.
“If the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop on the eve of the last election hadn’t been dismissed as Russian disinformation and systematically suppressed and silenced by social media companies, and if there hadn’t been a widely disproven Russia collusion hoax in the election before that, I don’t think people would have paid attention to the media coverage of this in this situation,” he said.
“This seems to be the latest avatar of something we’ve seen over the past few cycles.”
Many Democrats also criticized the media’s post-debate coverage, saying it focused too much on the so-called “bad night.”
