Donald Trump unleashed a raging Truth Social tirade on Friday attacking former MAGA allies who have turned on him over his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. This is making news mostly because it was unusually deranged even by Trump’s standards: It dragged on for 482 words and ripped his foes as “Flailing Fools” and “NUT JOBS.”
But buried in Trump’s rant is some actual news.
Trump’s eruption—which singled out critics like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Alex Jones, who have attacked the war and declared Trump’s genocidal threat disqualifying—specifically attacked Jones this way:
Bankrupt Alex Jones … says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.
Wait, so Trump thinks it was “horrendous” that Jones claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a “hoax”? That’s interesting. Because after Jones first pushed his vile conspiracy theories about the 2012 massacre—which took the lives of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut—some in Newtown publicly called on then-president Trump in 2017 to condemn Jones’s conspiracy theorizing about it. And they say it never happened.
It turns out that there’s a whole backstory here involving Trump, Jones, and Newtown that goes back many years. Now that Trump has reopened the topic, it deserves a recapping.
To wit: Back in 2015, when Jones was prominently questioning whether the Sandy Hook massacre really happened, insisting that it was staged by the government, Trump was untroubled by Jones’s claims. Running for president the first time, Trump appeared on Jones’s “Infowars” show that year to boost his candidacy. He praised Jones’s ability to get attention with his conspiracy-theorizing, declaring: “Your reputation is amazing.”
This understandably upset people in Newtown. In 2017, soon after Trump took office, the Newtown school board sent a letter to the new president, urging him to “clearly and unequivocally” recognize that the massacre had happened and denounce Jones’s lies about it. A perfunctory White House statement only condemned “hate” generally.
“We were hoping the president-elect would denounce Alex Jones for the damage he caused to families who did lose somebody and other families impacted by the tragedy,” Eric Paradis, who helped coordinate the letter as a member of the Newtown town council and whose own daughter survived the shooting, tells me. “He never did. We were disappointed in the lack of response.”
It’s important to emphasize that Jones’s conspiracy-mongering was profoundly painful to the survivors’ families and many others in Newtown. Conspiracy theorists descended on the town and harassed them. (Their lawsuits against Jones resulted in the liquidation of his personal assets.)
“We once had people associated with Jones come to a school board meeting to film us while asking why they couldn’t see pictures of the dead children to prove that they existed,” Keith Alexander, chair of the Newtown board of education at the time, tells me. “For a town recovering, it was an awful blow.” Yet Trump would apparently not denounce it.
All this gets at a deeper reality involving Trump and MAGA. Trump and many of his allies have long enthusiastically accommodated or even embraced the most vile fringe elements on the right, because the Trump coalition relies in part on them. In the wake of the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes’s overt white supremacy, for instance, JD Vance suggested that he would not subject Fuentes or others of his ilk to “self-defeating purity tests.”
Jones has long been a prime example of this. As Trump rose to power, he would sometimes give voice to Jones’s conspiracy theories in his own words, including the claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the founders of ISIS.
In the case of Jones’s Sandy Hook denial, the deepest sensitivities of a lot of living, breathing human beings were involved. Newtown had experienced the worst trauma imaginable, and the conspiracy-mongering about it was profoundly hurtful to many in the town. Yet while Trump did speak about the shooting back in 2012, when Jones was pushing his vile lies, Trump was apparently unable to see those affected as real people who didn’t deserve such deranged and malicious abuse.
To the people impacted by the shooting, then, seeing Trump issue this condemnation of Jones now—apparently only because Jones has been attacking him—is doubly insulting. “I’m totally shocked,” Alexander, the former board of education chair, told me. “It amazes me he would return to this to try and get attention.”
“It’s too bad that it takes something actually happening to the president to make him feel empathy for this community,” added Michelle Embree Ku, a Newtown resident and school board member at the time.
The perversity here runs deep. In describing Trump as unfit for the presidency over his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, Jones actually got something right, as did Trump’s other critics. But rather than simply climb down from this monumentally deranged vow to commit massive war crimes and murder tens of millions, Trump is able to perceive criticism of this only as an intolerable display of personal disloyalty to him. Incredibly, that’s what it took to get Trump to denounce Jones and, by extension, fully recognize, well over a decade too late, the horrors that the people of Newtown endured.
