There’s an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people, but Donald Trump somehow managed to fuse politics, reality television, professional wrestling, conspiracy culture, and internet trolling into one giant national psychosis.
And after ten years of it, I think we need to admit something uncomfortable: This man has genuinely damaged people’s brains. The crazy has rubbed off.
Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Literally, the way many Americans now process information, deal with emotion, and experience reality itself feels broken.
You can see it every time something awful happens, whether it was the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting during the 2024 campaign, the recent shooting outside a White House checkpoint last weekend, January 6th, election losses, court rulings, hurricanes, plane crashes, or public health emergencies. Pick your event.
Within minutes, millions of people no longer ask, “What happened?” Instead, they ask, “What’s the hidden plot?”
The event itself almost becomes secondary. The conspiracy theory arrives faster than the facts now, sometimes faster than the ambulances.
After the most recent White House shooting, where a gunman opened fire at a Secret Service checkpoint and was killed in the exchange, social media almost instantly filled with theories about “inside jobs,” “staged distractions,” and deep-state plots before investigators had even established basic facts about the suspect. The Guardian reported that the suspect had a documented history of mental health struggles and previous encounters with the Secret Service, but online conspiracy culture immediately overwhelmed reality anyway. Facts barely stood a chance.
And yes, conspiracy culture existed before Trump. America has always had weirdos convinced the moon landing was fake or Elvis was alive or the Illuminati controlled the Federal Reserve, or whatever.
But Trump took that fringe mentality and moved it directly into the center of American political life. He normalized pathological distrust as a worldview. For years, Trump taught people that literally any information he disliked was fake. Elections were rigged, judges were corrupt, the FBI was corrupt, scientists were corrupt, polls were fake, journalists were enemies, and entire institutions were secretly coordinating against him at all times like some low-budget Jason Bourne sequel.
At the same time, Trump himself has proven to be nothing more than a lying, grifting machine. And, immediately after the two latest incidents happened, Trump was right up there, babbling about how much he needs his ballroom. As The Guardian reported after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner incident, online conspiracies erupted almost instantly, echoing the same dynamic seen after Butler. The details barely mattered because people had already chosen their preferred mythology.
Eventually, it seems a lot of people have internalized the wacky environment we all live in now, thanks to Trump and social media, so deeply that they have lost the ability to process events normally. The side of irony here is that the Trump/social media circus of misinformation helps to create people who are insane enough to try to go after Trump, although this last guy is questionable as to what he was up to, exactly. He said he was Jesus, so who knows. The guy who took a shot at Trump during the campaign, the Charlie Kirk killer, and the guy who was lurking around the golf course when Trump was golfing all had a mishmash of political and societal beliefs that made little sense. Of COURSE you are going to have people trying to take a shot at Trump.
Modern conspiracism isn’t really about logic; it’s emotional. It’s become a coping mechanism for people whose brains have been rewired by years of outrage algorithms, partisan media, doomscrolling, and Trump-style political performance art. And Trump fed this mentality constantly because it benefited him politically.
The deeper into the Trump era we went, the more people either saw him as the lone “truth teller “or as someone so dishonest that you have to assume anything that happens near him is fake. Like the Boy Who Cried Wolf on meth and steroids. That’s the core trick of modern authoritarian-style politics: destroy public trust in every institution except the leader himself. Once people believe everybody lies, they become vulnerable to believing anything.
Honestly, some of the people most damaged by this environment aren’t even hardcore MAGA diehards anymore. The paranoia has spread outward into the broader culture. I increasingly see otherwise intelligent people immediately leap toward “false flag” explanations anytime a major political event happens. It’s infected everybody’s brains to some degree. While conspiracy theories on the left are far less dangerous than the right’s version, which are often based around hate and a desire for violence, it’s still not good.
And social media has turned this into a kind of dopamine addiction. Being the first person to “see through” an event online now carries social currency. People want to feel smarter than the official narrative. They want to believe they’ve uncovered hidden truths. The internet rewards that behavior with attention, engagement, community, and thanks to monetization based on clicks, money.
Reality itself becomes less satisfying than the conspiracy. The truly dangerous part is what this does to democracy over time.
Democracy requires some basic shared agreement about reality. Not complete agreement — that’s impossible — but at least a functioning consensus that facts exist and evidence matters. Once a country loses that, politics stops being a debate and starts becoming tribal mythology.
Every event becomes fan fiction, every tragedy becomes content. Every act of violence becomes instantly absorbed into competing online cinematic universes before investigators even tape off the crime scene.
Trump didn’t singlehandedly create America’s brain poisoning. Social media companies, partisan media ecosystems, cynical politicians, and internet culture all helped build this monster. But Trump absolutely accelerated it, rewarded it, normalized it, and mainstreamed it. And now we’re living in a country where millions of people instinctively believe the official explanation for literally anything must be false.
That’s not skepticism anymore. That’s collective psychological damage.
The last word goes to Slade: