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Trump's Truth posts mix wild conspiracies with market-moving policies

Trump's Truth posts mix wild conspiracies with market-moving policies
President Trump's Truth Social account is full of jarring juxtapositions: major trade policy announcements and presidential nominations broken up by bizarre conspiracies and personal boasts. Why it matters: The president's words matter, whether he's moving markets with tariff threats or spreading unfounded conspiracies about his political rivals, and the White House has mimicked Trump's bellicose online persona.Emboldened in his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists and posts without restraint.Driving the news: The president late on Saturday shared an outlandish conspiracy from another user who said that former President Biden had been "executed in 2020" and was replaced by clones or robots.Trump shared the post to his nearly 10 million followers with no context. In another strange post Wednesday, Trump shared a meme of himself walking down a dark city street with all-cap text that read, "HE'S ON A MISSION FROM GOD & NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING."Pepe the frog — a cartoon symbol embraced by the alt-right — is standing in the background. The edit was credited to another account on Truth Social.What they're saying: The White House didn't directly respond when asked about Trump sharing conspiracy theories. "President Trump has done more than any other president in modern history to stop antisemitic violence and hold corrupt institutions, like Harvard, accountable for allowing anti-American radicalism to escalate," White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email.The intrigue: Between those two posts, Trump made and shared (real) political and economic news.On Friday, he accused China of breaking the trade truce it reached with the U.S. The stock market immediately dropped on Trump's post.On Saturday, before he suggested his political rival had been executed, Trump announced he'd withdrawn Jared Isaacman's NASA nomination.He also shared highlights from his remarks at a U.S. Steel facility in Pennsylvania, where he said he'd increase tariffs on steel imports to 50% from 25%.Trump also used his Truth Social account to endorse books written by MAGA-aligned playwright David Mamet and Salena Zito, a journalist who detailed the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Yes, but: The things Trump doesn't post are just as striking.As of Monday morning, he had not commented on the Boulder, Colorado, attack near a rally advocating for the release of Hamas-held hostages in Gaza that sent eight people to the hospital.The official White House X account has reposted statements from several other administration officials condemning the attack.Context: It's not a new phenomenon for Trump to platform unproven conspiracies and misinformation on social media or in the White House.Per the Washington Post's count, the president made 30,573 untruthful statements during his first term, many of which he shared to Twitter. He's repeatedly said the 2020 election was stolen and has elevated racist "birther" conspiracies against his opponents. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump and Vice President Vance repeated a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets.And in a shocking Oval Office encounter last month with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump pointed to misleading images when doubling down on the "white genocide" conspiracy theory.The bottom line: With no fact-checks or consequences for falsehoods, Trump can be, as he's shared multiple posts saying, "right about everything."Go deeper: Trump cites mainstream outlets, despite fights

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