Just when you thought Donald Trump might be turning a corner in his treatment of Joe Biden the POTUS has served up a reminder of his ruthless (and at times bizarre) approach to dealing with political rivals past and present.
Last month, Biden’s office revealed that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. The saddening update prompted an outpouring of support, and even Donald Trump had an uncharacteristically measured response to the news.
“At the time, Trump struck an unusually compassionate tone:
‘Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery,’ he wrote on social media.
But just weeks later, that brief moment of sympathy appears to have vanished.
On Saturday night, Trump reposted a baseless — and deeply bizarre — conspiracy theory on Truth Social, claiming that Biden had been executed in 2020 and replaced by clones or robotic replicas.
The original post, shared by an anonymous Truth Social user, alleged that Biden had been substituted with ‘clones, doubles,’ and ‘robotic engineered soulless mindless entities.’”
Despite being completely detached from logic, reason, or evidence, Donald Trump shared a link promoting the outlandish Biden clone conspiracy theory with his nearly 10 million followers on Truth Social — without context, disclaimer, or explanation.
And that wasn’t all.
In a scathing Memorial Day post that seemed more focused on stoking division than honoring the fallen, Trump lashed out at the Biden administration, using inflammatory language to describe his political opponents.
“Happy Memorial Day to all,” he wrote, “including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…” He went on to accuse the administration of allowing “21,000,000 people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane,” and blamed “USA-hating judges” for protecting what he described as “murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners.”
Trump’s willingness to amplify conspiracy theories is nothing new. While the claim that Joe Biden has been replaced by robotic clones may be among the more absurd, it fits within a pattern of spreading disinformation to energize his base.
Few need reminding of Trump’s relentless insistence — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. It’s a claim he continues to promote. Prior to that, he infamously pushed the false birther conspiracy against Barack Obama, only retracting it after years of public pressure.
And who could forget one of his most notorious comments from the 2024 campaign trail — a wild claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of American citizens?
We certainly haven’t.
