Truth Social is an incubator of paranoid conspiracy theories about Ukraine.
A reporter had gone to a Trump rally and wandered among the crowd asking people how they’d feel if Russia won the war, destroying Kyiv and wiping Ukraine off the map. One woman made clear she had no objection to the invasion or the killing of Ukrainians: “That’s fine,” she asserted truculently. “That’s fine with me.” An older man whose hat read “Vietnam Veteran” agreed: “I don’t think Putin’s the problem. I think Zelensky’s the problem. . . . Putin is trying to save his country from the likes of idiots like Zelensky and the elitists.” Another man in line outside the rally drove the point home: “This [Biden] administration’s trying to start a war with Russia. Russia’s not our enemy.”
What else was hiding under the rock, I wondered, and at first I was afraid to look. But then I spent a few days on Truth Social and other far-right sites.
One group of MAGA supporters thinks it’s all just fake news—there is no war. “I think the whole thing is fabricated,” one woman in a sequined jacket covered with MAGA insignia told a correspondent from The Daily Show. “Where is the war footage?” a conservative commentator and former Fox News producer tweeted to his 315,000 followers in February 2023, a year into the war. “This smacks of a scam.” Conservative podcaster Stew Peters echoed the sentiment, telling his 163,000 Twitter followers, “The world is a stage. It’s ALL fake.”
Still others who blame Ukraine buy Moscow’s nonsensical claim that Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s Jewish president, is a Nazi. Truth Social contributor “TrollHunter” (@Jeanette159) isn’t sure if Zelensky is a Nazi or if Ukraine is a Communist country—in fact, she thinks both are true. But either way, she’s convinced “it was Ukraine’s aggression” that started the war. Drak7 agreed: “Putin is a Patriot protecting her [sic] people only.”
A third group of MAGA supporters believes the war is Biden’s personal project—that he started it or is advancing it out of some demonic death wish. “BIDEN MAY LITERALLY CAUSE NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION UPON THE EARTH,” Maximumhaleem screamed on Truth Social
In the mid-twentieth century, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America to its senses and a vast populist isolationist movement—in 1939, on the eve of World War II, 84 percent of Americans thought the United States should stay out of the fight in Europe—evaporated overnight.
Who or what will be able to slay the isolationist monster that Donald Trump and his allies have created? It could be much harder this time around in an era when so few believe in the idea of truth.