How the right-wing echo chamber constructed a Biden assassination plot against Trump

[Nevilledog]

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-wing-echo-chamber-constructed-biden-assassination-plot-against-trump

Over a handful of hours on Tuesday, the right’s conspiracy theory ecosystem concocted a sinister plot by President Joe Biden to assassinate his predecessor out of the banal fact that FBI agents received standard instructions on the use of force before conducting a court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.

Hundreds of pages of filings were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s classified documents case, revealing that the former president — who is charged with 40 federal criminal counts related to his alleged willful retention of documents after leaving the White House — had multiple documents marked “classified” in his bedroom that were discovered months after the 2022 search.

Credible outlets reviewed the documents and produced a wave of news stories detailing what a judge described as “strong evidence” of Trump’s allegedly criminal acts. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA media supporters ginned up a counternarrative based on a credulous reading of a deceptive argument from Trump’s lawyers that was included in the unsealed documents.

The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.

*snip*

[underpants]

1. They could tell those dumbasses the sun rises in the West

and they’d all plaster it everyone…plus the Russians would too.

[captain queeg]

2. Maybe whoever has been backing trump behind the scenes is starting to realize he's a loser

And trying to set the stage for capitalizing on his dropping out of the picture, permanently. I can’t help but think there are a lot of shady characters that have got on the trump train for their own purposes. They might be seeing their investment going down the tubes and thinking of how they can work it to their advantage.

[SWBTATTReg]

3. Ah, the crap that is in the sub-basement of faux/Fox news has finally been reached, and old copies of unpublished

issues of the National Enquirer and the articles in them, such as the one here, are being republished.

These idiots coming up w/ all of these fringe theories etc. are desperate to try and paint their ICON in a far better light, and they are failing miserably.

[maxrandb]

4. It spreads

because our fucked-up media just fucking report it as an "either/or" issue.

"Breaking News Chuck, the Retrumplicans claim President Biden ordered an assassination of Donnie Dipshit (sic). The White House claims they didn't....guess we'll never know. Back to you Andrea"

[delisen]

5. Projection is also at work here. nt

[Ping Tung]

6. I'm confident that the former president will repudiate such claims as "silly fake news".

Or, maybe not.