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On June 15th, Donald Trump declared war on blue cities. 

”[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, [which are] are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens,” Trump posted to Truth Social, riffing on the interlocking conspiracy theories that define his second term. 

The next day, at the G7 summit, a reporter asked Trump about the post. Why was he singling out Democratic cities? Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden let in 21 million migrants of whom “vast numbers” were “murderers, killers, and people from gangs.” Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s mouth fell. His eyes darted back and forth, as if he were scanning the back of the room for a rescue party. 

Trump continued. Most of those people are in Democrat-run cities, he claimed, “and they think they’re going to use them to vote. It’s not going to happen.” Before Trump could elaborate, Carney abruptly ended the press conference, but it was too late. 

Trump had tied the Big Lie to the Great Replacement on the world stage. He had voiced the astonishing lie that Democrats were deliberately importing illegal migrants to expand their political power through electoral and benefits fraud, and that he was bringing the might of the federal government against Democratic cities to stop it. 

Earlier, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem boasted that the feds were occupying Los Angeles in order “to liberate” it from “socialists.” Noem was not speaking metaphorically, as Trump had already deployed the National Guard and the Marines to LA. 

Conspiracy theories have driven policy before. George W. Bush advanced the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein launched the 9/11 attacks to sell a war of aggression in the Middle East. Red scares have been used to justify deportations and political purges. But Donald Trump’s second term stands out because his entire domestic policy agenda is driven by three interlocking conspiracy theories that form the core of maga ideology: The Deep State, the Big Lie, and the Great Replacement. These Big Three conspiracy theories drive Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, his assault on the welfare state, his purge of the civil service, and more. 

In maga mythology, the Deep State includes any part of government or civil society that checks Trump’s power: civil servants, Democratic legislators, state and local officials, unions, scientists, judges, George Soros, Hollywood, the FBI, antifa, DEI, and any part of big business Trump happens to be beefing with. Sometimes, the Deep State is said to be communist, globalist, neoliberal, satanic, or Jewish. These players don’t get along, but that’s irrelevant. The Deep State is whatever maga needs it to be. One thing is certain. Whatever goes right is from Donald Trump’s genius and whatever goes wrong is the Deep State’s fault. 

Trump clings to the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and blames the Deep State for his defeat. He also accuses the Deep State of deliberately engineering the recent influx of immigrants. It’s not that the US attracts migrants because it’s a beacon of opportunity for people facing poverty, crime, climate catastrophe, or political repression at home. People aren’t coming here because it’s a wonderful place. No, according to maga, America is a dystopian hellscape that nobody would immigrate to if the Deep State weren’t bribing migrants with welfare to commit election fraud. It’s not just that borders were “left open,” Elon Musk claimed on X. “There was a massive, concerted campaign to usher in as many illegals as possible on an unprecedented scale in order to achieve permanent one-party rule. Treason.”

On the campaign trail, Trump claimed Times Square had been taken over by migrants with super-weapons and that migrant gangs were poised to overrun the state of Colorado and depose the governor. The media shrugged. In office, he seized extraordinary powers on the false pretext that the Tren de Aragua street gang was an invading arm of the Venezuelan military. 

An eccentric castle-dwelling French intellectual named Renaud Camus coined the term Great Replacement in a 2012 book by the same name. Camus argued that treacherous European governments were deliberately replacing their white citizens with Muslim immigrants in what he called a genocide of white people. More explicitly antisemitic variants of the same theory alleged that the Jews were behind white genocide through mass migration. 

The concept of the Great Replacement was popularized by mass shooters who name-checked the conspiracy theory in their manifestos. These include the Christchurch mosque shooter, the El Paso Walmart shooter, and the Buffalo supermarket shooter. The Nazis on the streets of Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” as they marched by torchlight. 

In the last few years, the Great Replacement has jumped from mass murder manifestos podcast rants to mainstream Republican rhetoric. Last month, Elon Musk’s Grok AI bot went nuts on X and tried to shoehorn the concept of white genocide into every conversation, leading many to wonder if the head of DOGE was putting his thumb on the scale to promote the concept. Then Donald Trump ambushed the president of South Africa with baseless allegations of white genocide during an Oval Office visit. 

ICE head Tom Homan breezily blamed a conspiracy by the United Nations and NGOs to manipulate Joe Biden into letting in so many migrants. “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings,” Homan told Tucker Carlson. 

Trump and Musk are using the Big Lie and the Great Replacement to justify their extremely unpopular attacks on the welfare state. The vast majority of Americans want to see Social Security defended and even expanded. Trump is trying to convince his base to welcome its own impoverishment by painting the benefits they rely on as a Democratic conspiracy to enrich illegal immigrants. 

On Fox, Musk smeared Social Security and other entitlements as “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.” 

Undocumented immigrants can’t vote or collect Social Security. Migrants who use fake SSNs actually subsidize the program by paying for benefits they never collect. Trump’s immigration crackdown is hurting Social Security by driving those hardworking taxpayers away. 

Last month, Trump reversed his prior opposition to Medicaid cuts on the grounds that the Republicans’ plan to strip health insurance from 14 million low-income people will “kick millions of Illegal Aliens off of Medicaid to PROTECT it for those who are the ones in real need.” Meanwhile, 81 percent of Americans oppose Medicaid cuts to fund upperclass tax cuts, according to a 2025 poll by Navigator Research. 

Donald Trump’s statements are so bizarre that they don’t register with mainstream media as political arguments. They are often dismissed as bluster or cognitive glitches. However, one can’t understand Trump and his policy priorities until you accept that conspiracy theories dominate his worldview and that all his major initiatives are justified to his base in conspiratorial terms. Donald Trump has used conspiracy theories as a pretext to declare war on Democrats and shore up authoritarian rule. 

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