Trump and the Conspiracists, at Home and Abroad

In the spring of 2008, during the primary campaign that, on the Democratic side, pitted the veteran political figure Hillary Clinton against the ascendant upstart Barack Obama, I visited a friend in White Bluff, Tennessee. A small, down-at-heel country town that sits in forested countryside about an hour west of Nashville, White Bluff is perhaps best known nowadays for a roadside barbecue place, Carl’s Perfect Pig, that draws customers from miles around. The median income of the town’s three-thousand-odd people, ninety-eight per cent of whom are white, is around forty thousand dollars. One morning, my friend and I found ourselves in a pharmacy, waiting for a prescription to be filled. There was a TV, with its sound turned off, flashing the customary wall of images about the campaign season. Clinton’s face soon appeared on the screen, followed by Obama’s. A man standing in line next to me, holding the hand of a young boy who was perhaps six years old, remarked loudly, “That Obama. He’s a Muslim.” I said, “No, I don’t think he is. He’s a Christian.” He shook his head and retorted, “No, sir. He’s a Muslim. I heard him say so himself, right there on CNN.”