A Department of Justice for an Age of Conspiracy Theories [View all]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/doj-conspiracy-theorists-trump/687246/


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https://archive.md/20260521151920/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/doj-conspiracy-theorists-trump/687246/

Not so very long ago, the Justice Department stood as a bulwark of facts against Donald Trump’s wildest claims. During his first term, a pattern emerged: Trump would make a bizarre assertion (say, that Barack Obama had illegally wiretapped Trump Tower), a litigant would point to this assertion in court to cast doubt on the Justice Department’s arguments, and DOJ attorneys would be forced to explain to an irritated judge that the president’s statements did not actually reflect the government’s position on the matter. Checking Trump’s comments against what a government lawyer was willing to swear in front of a judge was a handy way of demonstrating how Trump’s version of reality measured up to the truth.

In the second term, the Justice Department no longer sets itself at a polite distance from the baseless allegations shared by the president in his late-night Truth Social posts. This week, DOJ announced an “anti-weaponization” fund of dubious legality, intended to pay back victims of “weaponization and lawfare”—an apparent reference to prosecuted January 6 insurrectionists. In language that could have been written by Trump himself, the press release derides “the unlawful raid of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia-collusion hoax.” The dollar amount of the fund, $1.776 billion, seems selected more for symbolism than for utility.

DOJ is now very much an active participant in today’s conspiracy-theory ecosystem. On X, official DOJ accounts and those of the department’s leaders produce a steady stream of images, clips, and one-liners in the apparent hope of drawing in MAGA influencers. These posts, light on facts and heavy on exaggeration and outrage, echo far-fetched ideas already popular on the right and help seed new narratives—part of a give-and-take relationship in which DOJ both feeds and responds to conspiracy theories.

Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, has argued that we live in an age of “participatory propaganda”—rumors and falsehoods developed through an improvisational exchange between influential figures and the audiences who follow them. The propaganda can range from outright lies to misleading framings of things that really did happen. In 2020, this iterative process helped develop the Big Lie of a stolen election and fueled the attack on the Capitol. Now the government has inserted itself into the process. As Starbird put it in a 2025 lecture, “The machinery of bullshit” has become part of “the political infrastructure of this country.”

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