President Trump shared an outlandish conspiracy theory on social media on Saturday night saying former President Joseph R. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, the latest example of the President amplifying dark, false material to his millions of followers.
Trump reposted a fringe rant that another user had made on the President’s social media platform, Truth Social, just after 10 pm on Saturday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the post about Biden, whom Trump has targeted for criticism almost daily since the start of his second term.
The President has blamed Biden for all manner of societal ills and assailed his mental acuity, including with the specious theory that Biden’s aides used an autopen to enact policies and issue pardons without Biden’s knowledge. ( Trump has acknowledged that his administration uses the autopen system on occasion.)
Trump has long had a penchant for sharing debunked or baseless theories online, but his embrace of conspiracies is not limited to social media. He has also elevated false claims inside the White House and surrounded himself with cabinet officials promoting such theories.
Last month, while sitting next to the President of South Africa in the Oval Office, Trump claimed that white South African farmers were victims of mass killings and displayed an image intended to back up his assertion; the image was actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. Trump has falsely asserted that white South Africans are victims of genocide, even though police statistics do not show that white people in the nation are any more vulnerable than other groups.
Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with false or misleading statements — according to one tally, he made 30,573 of them, or 21 a day on average — and he repeatedly shared conspiracy theories in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
A New York Times analysis of thousands of Trump’s social media posts and reposts over a six-month period in 2024 found that at least 330 of them described both a false, secretive plot against Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it. They included suggestions that the FBI had ordered his assassination and accusations that government officials had orchestrated the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s repost of the robot conspiracy theory came a day after Biden told reporters that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Trump has suggested that Biden’s diagnosis last month had been concealed from the public.
‘Prognosis is good’
Biden said on Friday afternoon that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. “The prognosis is good,” he said.
“We’re working on everything. All the folks are optimistic,” he added, referring to his medical team. He said that one of the surgeons treating him was given the same diagnosis 32 years ago.
Biden spoke to reporters after an event honoring veterans in New Castle, Delaware, making his first public remarks since May 18, when his office announced his illness and said the cancer had metastasized to the bone. Biden attended the event, which fell on the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Beau, with Beau’s son, Robert Biden II, who graduated from high school this week.
Biden said that his treatment was “all a matter of taking a pill, one particular pill”.
“The expectation is we’re going to be able to beat this,” he said. Biden’s cancer was given a Gleason score of 9. The score is used to describe how prostate cancers look under a microscope; 9 and 10 are the most aggressive. Biden, 82, left office in January as the oldest-serving president in American history.
Asked about a new book, Original Sin, by the journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which details how Biden’s advisers curbed discussion of his age-related limitations in the run-up to the 2024 election, he responded tongue-in-cheek, saying, “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk.”
New York Times News Service