MAGA’s magic bullet

In a week of thunderous executive orders – declaring a national emergency at the southern border, withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement and World Health Organization, pardoning more than 1500 January 6 seditionists, overturning the constitutional entitlement to birthright citizenship, and much else – this instruction to declassify long-sealed files was mostly reported as a curiosity, almost as light relief.

Yet, in one sense, it is the most symbolically important of them all, the order which tells us more than any other about the president, MAGA and the convulsions now gripping US politics. There is a psychological thread that twitches between the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and Trump’s return to the White House.

For RFK Jr, the president’s controversial nominee to be health secretary, this declassification is indeed a personal triumph, the end of a long campaign for transparency. In his family memoir American Values (2018), Kennedy recalls that his father, Robert Sr, believed that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy from the moment that J Edgar Hoover tersely informed him that his brother was dead. (The FBI director, it is worth noting, was old enough to remember the assassination in 1901 of Trump’s latest hero, President William McKinley.)

“My dad immediately suspected that the CIA had killed Uncle Jack,” writes RFK Jr. “After Hoover’s call, he called a yet-unidentified CIA official and asked point-blank, ‘Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?’ Then my father invited [John] McCone [the CIA director] to take a walk with him in the yard. Out of earshot of my mother, he asked McCone whether the CIA had killed his brother. McCone denied it”. 

Kennedy also believes that Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian-Jordanian still in prison for the murder of RFK Sr at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, is innocent. “Records of the case demonstrate that Los Angeles police investigators bullied and badgered eyewitnesses to change their statements regarding the number of shots and to silence those… who reported conspirators dashing from the scene,” he wrote in 2021.

As for Dr King, gunned down at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, his assassin, James Earl Ray, a white supremacist and admirer of Hitler, referred at his sentencing to “the conspiracy thing”. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that, as King’s family had long claimed, “there is a likelihood” that he did not act alone.

Even by Trump’s standards, it was grotesque of the arch-nativist to invoke the name of the revered civil rights leader in his inaugural address and claim his legacy – while preparing to dismantle all federal diversity programmes. “Today is Martin Luther King Day,” he said. “And his honour — this will be a great honour… We will make his dream come true”.

As crass as this was, it was also very much in keeping with Trump’s habit of hijacking greatness wherever he sees it. He reportedly toyed with making RFK Jr his running mate, loving the idea of the juxtaposed names “Trump-Kennedy” on placards, billboards, T-shirts and social media. And he did nothing to dissuade comparisons of JFK’s assassination and his own narrow escape from death in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. 

Trump’s order of January 23 does not mean that the declassified files will be released immediately, only mandating the presentation of plans for full disclosure of the JFK records within 15 days and of the RFK Sr and King documents within 45 days. Nonetheless, armies of conspiracy theorists and researchers are already straining at the leash to get their hands on what they regard as the secretum secretorum of America’s dark history.

What will they be looking for? In King’s case, any evidence of FBI incompetence or delay will encourage the belief that Hoover, who was known to hate him, was in some way implicated in his murder (the FBI director was powerfully aware that this conclusion would be drawn and instructed no fewer than 3,000 agents to track down Ray, who was finally arrested in London travelling as “Ramon George Sneyd”).

As for the assassination of RFK Sr, true obsessives will be searching for evidence that Sirhan was involved in the CIA’s MKUltra brainwashing programme, and for further details of the legendary “girl in the polka-dot dress”, supposedly seen at the hotel and heard to claim complicity in the crime.

Most attention, however, will be taken up by the remaining JFK files. For decades, the assassination of the 35^th president has gripped America’s psyche and culture. More than 40,000 books have been written about Kennedy, many of them solely about his murder. 

Naturally, the great US novelists have been drawn to the subject, as one of the nation’s defining myths: Don DeLillo in Libra (1988), Norman Mailer in Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery and James Ellroy in American Tabloid (both 1995).

In 1975, the broadcast on Geraldo Rivera’s ABC show of Abraham Zapruder’s shocking footage of Kennedy’s head exploding as he was hit by a second bullet inspired a fresh wave of conspiracy theories – suggesting, as it did, that a gunman had shot the president from the famous grassy knoll (rather than, as the Warren Commission insisted in September 1964, from the Book Depository, 265 feet behind the motorcade).

Oliver Stone’s absorbing but deeply misleading movie JFK (1991) nurtured public demand for what became the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. More recently, Joe Rogan’s obsession with the case – driven by his reading of David Lifton’s laborious book, Best Evidence (1980) – has introduced a new generation to the conspiracist-industrial complex. Tucker Carlson never misses an opportunity to do the same. The Turning Point USA co-founder, Charlie Kirk, has called the JFK conspiracy theory “an introductory radicalising event”.

Though the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the congressional committee’s report of 1979 ruled that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” – possibly involving the Mafia or anti-Castro Cubans.

Reporters and researchers will sift feverishly through the new files for fresh material on Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1962; his involvement with the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans; the respective knowledge of the FBI and CIA of his activities before the assassination, especially his strange trip in September 1963 to Mexico City, where he visited the Soviet embassy and Cuban consulate; his alleged acquaintance with Jack Ruby, who murdered him at Dallas police headquarters on November 24; and, of course, the famous “magic bullet”, CE-399, found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, and supposedly responsible for seven wounds suffered by JFK and the Texas governor, John Connally.

In his interview with Rogan in October, Trump explained that he had been asked not to release all the files during his first term because some of those involved were still alive and “there could be some national security reason that for, you know, that I don’t have to necessarily know about”. 

But, he continued, the time had come for full disclosure: “I think it’s going to be just fine to open it… It’s going to be time. It’s a cleansing, you know, it’s really a cleansing”.

This was characteristically disingenuous. Whatever the declassified files reveal, the conspiracy theories will continue, compulsively so. That is the whole point of such belief systems: they never provide true closure or release from suspicion. 

Instead, they give their adherents a means of decoding the world, a map of meaning and a conviction that they have experienced a revelation, an enlightenment or an awakening; that, in a metaphor borrowed from The Matrix (1999), they have been taken the “red pill”. Paradoxically, the knowledge that an identifiable evil is at work in the world is more reassuring than the fear that history is chaotic and arbitrary. 

This is one reason why, as trust in traditional institutions and the legacy media has plummeted, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. According to a YouGov poll in December 2023, 54 per cent of Americans believe that Oswald definitely or probably did not act alone. More than 30 per cent think that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (the false “Birther” theory that Trump did so much to disseminate).

One in five believes that the federal government used Covid vaccines to microchip Americans. A similar number have been persuaded that 9/11 was an inside job. 

As TNE’s own James Ball writes in his definitive book on the QAnon conspiracy, The Other Pandemic (2023), these “digital pathogens” have comprehensively infected public life. The Q theory – whose adherents believe that a cabal of satanic paedophiles is secretly running the world – influenced many of the January 6 rioters. And, as James writes, “one of [its] strangest subcultures is one that focuses on the Kennedys”: most vividly dramatised in the gathering in Dealey Plaza in November 2021, where John F Kennedy Jr, who had (of course) faked his own death in 1999, was supposed to appear and herald the return of Trump (he didn’t). 

This extraordinary shift in the way that the public interprets the world was foreseen by the great political commentator Richard Hofstadter in a 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. There was nothing new, he noted, in the belief that secret plotters were at work in the world. 

“But the modern right wing,” Hofstadter wrote, “feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. 

“The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals… the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high”.

With astonishing accuracy, Hofstadter identified the poisonous roots of what would become, half a century later, MAGA and the cult of Trump. Contemporary right wing populism feeds on fear of the Deep State, of “globalists”, of unaccountable forces allegedly robbing Americans of their liberty, pride and prosperity. 

A core objective of Trump’s second term – personified by Kash Patel, the deranged and supremely unqualified conspiracist he has nominated as FBI director – is to dismantle the “administrative state”, overhaul the mighty American intelligence and security establishment, and abolish many federal agencies.

Depressingly, there is an electoral appetite for much of this. What used to be called citizenship has increasingly been supplanted by the conspiracist sensibility. The old institutional order, structures of knowledge and authority, and traditional sources of information are all in grave decline. 

Virulent theories proliferate, weaponised online and designed to fend off facts, evidence and rational argument. Social experiences that would  once have encouraged collaboration – a pandemic, for example – now mobilise distrust and scepticism. In less than five years, Covid has spawned almost as many conspiracy theories as JFK’s assassination has in more than six decades.

Such beliefs are the oxygen that keeps MAGA alive. Trump grasps intuitively that the release of these files will raise more questions than it answers; that the mysteries will persist and the suspicions deepen. 

The defining feature of conspiracism is that it never ends; and, under this president’s baleful eye, the sleep of reason will endure.