Under his leadership, the Republican Party is now openly embracing candidates of that same ilk -- raising the possibility that those ideas will make their way to the halls of Congress.
The latest example of the surreal twist that Trump has wrought on his party is the primary upset in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District where Lauren Boebert, a right-wing challenger who sympathized with the pro-Trump deep state conspiracy known as QAnon, unseated five-term Congressman Scott Tipton.
The political fortunes of Boebert, who argued she would be a better advocate for Trump's agenda in Washington than Tipton, rose along with two other QAnon supporters: Georgia congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene and Oregon GOP Senate Nominee Jo Rae Perkins. In Trump's shadow, the one-time fringe candidates are now potential standard bearers.
All three candidates have either sympathized with or actively support QAnon, a theory that there is a high-level government official known as "Q" who leaves clues around the Internet about a "deep state" conspiracy. Those who embrace the theory believe that previous presidents before Trump were part of a criminal enterprise, and Trump is the emissary allied with the military who will root out that corruption. Trump elevated QAnon in a series of retweets in late 2019, as chronicled by the Daily Beast's Will Sommer in his extensive reporting on the movement.
In any other political universe, it would have been inconceivable that candidates espousing those views would rise to the top of the Republican field in their respective states. But Trump has ushered conversations that used to occur in the dark recesses of the internet out from the shadows by drawing attention to them in his tweets to his more than 82 million followers.
It isn't just political candidates with conspiracy links whose political fortunes are rising. Over the past few years while exploring the backgrounds of potential and current members of Trump's team, CNN's KFile team uncovered connections to or affirmations of fringe conspiracy theories among more than a dozen Trump appointees, nominees or advisers.
The latest is Trump's nominee to be under secretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense, retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata. CNN's KFile uncovered how Tata promoted theories that John Brennan, the former CIA director, wanted to oust Trump from office, pushing one false theory that Brennan sent a coded tweet to order Trump's assassination in 2018.
Driving fringe theories to the center of the campaign
Trump realized long ago that championing conspiracy theories was a swift and easy way to generate publicity, and he often waded into racially divisive debates to maximize the attention he would draw. He has embraced so many off-the-wall theories that there are almost too many to count.
He led the "birther" crusade questioning Barack Obama's birth in Hawaii. He falsely asserted in 2012 that climate change was a hoax created by the Chinese "in order to make US
