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Donald Trump Retweeted an Absolutely Unhinged QAnon Conspiracy Theory & Everyone’s Just Too Exhausted to Care

Donald Trump holds masks in front of Air Force One.

There’s been so much going on lately, from Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to the fast-approaching election to Donald Trump’s hospitalization and subsequent apparent desire to spread COVID-19 to each and every one of his supporters individually.

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We’re all so inundated with news all the time and it’s all urgent, breaking, deeply important news, that it can be hard to feel the appropriate level of horror when Donald Trump does something like, say, retweet an absolutely batshit QAnon conspiracy theory about Barack Obama faking the assassination of Osama bin Laden and murdering Navy SEALs. Which is exactly what Trump did do earlier this week.

The Daily Beast explains what this means:

President Donald Trump backed a budding conspiracy theory on Tuesday that four Americans were killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack to cover up the blood-sacrifice of Navy SEALs and the “fact” that Osama Bin Laden is still alive, marking what is perhaps the president’s strangest brush yet with far-right conspiracy theories.

Trump’s promotion of the new Benghazi conspiracy theory, which is fast gaining traction on the far right, came in the form of a retweet of a QAnon believer pushing the claim. The president’s backing helped push the tweet about Benghazi above 14,000 retweets. Trump retweeted another video about the conspiracy theory later on Tuesday night, marking the second time he had promoted the Benghazi claims on Twitter.

At any other time, in any other world, that would be a gigantic story. In this world, no one even has any room for it.

Famed Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill, who was part of the operation to kill bin Laden, clearly didn’t appreciate Trump’s amplification and apparent endorsement of the conspiracy theory.

But at least he has a sense of humor about it. It is hard to take Trump seriously, after all.

(image: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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