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.
