President Donald Trump has lengthy been obsessive about gold, however just lately, he’s develop into fixated on the gold held within the depository at Fort Knox and a right-wing conspiracy principle alleging that its gold has someway been stolen.
Trump took time away from his assembly with French President Emmanuel Macron on the White Home this previous Monday to convey up his gold fixation.
“We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there. Because maybe somebody stole it,” he informed Macron and reporters.
Trump surprisingly isn’t alone on this. MAGA loyalist Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene additionally has gold fever.
“I will be calling the Treasury and arranging for the [House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency] to go and inspect the gold at Fort Knox,” she wrote on X on Monday.
However apart from Trump bringing it up, neither Fort Knox nor the subject of gold safety has been within the information just lately. So why is gold prime of thoughts for the chief of the US and his acolytes?
This time, the supply of the fixation seems to be Trump’s billionaire financier and co-President Elon Musk. Two weeks in the past, the account for the conspiracy principle web site Zero Hedge tagged Musk and requested him to “take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of U.S. gold is there.” The account falsely claimed that the “last time anyone looked was 50 years ago in 1974.”
Musk asserted that he thought the gold was reviewed every year, and Zero Hedge stated this wasn’t the case. In response to Musk, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—son of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a conspiracy theorist and racist—known as for an investigation of the gold provide.
These assertions are further absurd in gentle of the truth that Steven Mnuchin, who was then Trump’s personal treasury secretary, visited Fort Knox and took pictures with bars of gold in August 2017. And Mnuchin wasn’t alone on that journey. Becoming a member of him had been U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza and a bunch of Kentucky Republicans, together with Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Gov. Matt Bevin, and Rep. Brett Guthrie.
Nonetheless, following the “gold” alternate between Musk and the conspiracy web site, the subject was raised again and again on Fox Information and Fox Enterprise, throughout a number of packages like “The Five,” “Jesse Watters Primetime,” “Gutfeld!,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and others, in accordance with a Every day Kos search of TVEyes, a database of TV, radio, and on-line video.
Trump has usually made selections on the presidential degree primarily based on half-baked data (or outright falsehoods) that he absorbs by way of social media and Fox Information, and his Fort Knox fixation appears to fall proper consistent with that.
However conspiracies about gold predate Trump’s time main the Republican Celebration. As an example, in 2011, when he was representing Texas within the Home, the aforementioned Ron Paul floated the notion that the bars of gold within the fort had been pretend and that they had been simply steel bars painted gold.
Conservatives have entertained all types of fevered goals concerning the gold provide ever since America (and far of the remainder of the world) went off the gold customary in 1971.
These conspiracies have additionally led to a profitable market in fearmongering promoting and scams primarily based on convincing conservatives to “invest” in gold, which is marketed as a steady commodity—significantly if their nightmare of a left-wing dominated world takes maintain. A lot of conservative media, from proper wing radio to TV retailers like Fox Information and Newsmax, is propped up by gold-related promoting.
Maybe the right expression of all this was mirrored within the rip-off uncovered earlier this month by which Trump followers had been persuaded to place their cash in a gold rip-off, hocked by way of AI-generated imagery of Trump.
Trump’s newest gold fixation is what occurs when a long time of right-wing conspiracy tradition turns into intertwined with the mainstream Republican Celebration. By elevating a long-time conspiracy theorist like Trump to steer the occasion—and now the nation once more—gold fever was in all probability inevitable.
