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Political Memo

As Donald Trump Pushes Conspiracy Theories, Right-Wing Media Gets Its Wish

Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night in Albuquerque. His unrestrained style is indisputably good TV, as his primary race opponents discovered, and poses a threat to Democrats that may not be so easily neutralized by the usual tactics.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Ever since talk radio, cable news and the Internet emerged in the 1990s as potent political forces on the right, Republicans have used those media to attack their opponents through a now-familiar two-step.

Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly media like The Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh — and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media.

Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud, if possible, so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate.

Yet by personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a Clinton White House aide, Donald J. Trump is again defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style — one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity.

“They’ve reverse-engineered the way it has always worked because they now have a candidate willing to say it himself,” said Danny Diaz, who was a top aide in Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. Mr. Diaz spoke with a measure of wonder about the spectacle of the party’s presumptive nominee discussing Mr. Clinton’s sexual escapades.

With Mr. Trump as the presumptive Republican standard-bearer, the line separating the conservative mischief makers and the party’s more-buttoned-up cadre of elected officials and aides has been obliterated. Fusing what had been two separate but symbiotic forces, Mr. Trump has begun a real-life political science experiment: What happens when a major party’s nominee is more provocateur than politician?

That the Republican Party has embraced someone willing to traffic in the most inflammatory of accusations comes as wish fulfillment for an element of the right that is convinced that the party lost the past two elections because its candidates were unwilling to attack President Obama forcefully enough.

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Donald Trump’s Conspiracy Theories

From hinting that Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered to suggesting that George W. Bush knew the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were coming, Donald J. Trump has shared many outrageous conspiracy theories.

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From hinting that Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered to suggesting that George W. Bush knew the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were coming, Donald J. Trump has shared many outrageous conspiracy theories.CreditCredit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times

In this telling, in 2008, Senator John McCain should have focused on Mr. Obama’s relationships with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the onetime radical Bill Ayers, and on discredited claims about Mr. Obama’s birthplace and ties to Islam. And Mitt Romney lost four years later because he, too, ignored those issues, as well as other fixations of the conservative news media like the terrorist attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Now Republicans have a candidate who, as Mr. Limbaugh put it on his show on Tuesday, “has gone there.”

“Trump has gone to all of this Clinton conspiracy stuff,” Mr. Limbaugh said. Mr. Trump, he added, was “doing the job the American media and the Republican Party won’t do.”

The Drudge Report was downright gleeful, running a “Vince Foster Lives!” banner headline on Tuesday.

Roger J. Stone Jr., the political operative who is Mr. Trump’s longtime confidant and an unapologetic stirrer of strife, called Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney “losers” for their more restrained approaches.

“Comity gets you beat,” he said, adding, “It takes guts to win — and Trump doesn’t look at polls, he just swings.”

But that is precisely what has many Republicans, and some Democrats, nervous.

“He’s never been involved in policy making or party building or the normal things a candidate would do,” said Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist. “His whole frame of reference is daytime Fox News and Infowars,” a website run by the conservative commentator Alex Jones.

Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s former chief of staff, said Mr. Trump was making common cause with “the lunatic fringe,” citing his willingness to appear on the radio show of Mr. Jones, who has said that Michelle Obama is a man.

“I fear that it, if not a mortal blow, at least does lasting damage as the demographic clock keeps ticking away on us,” Mr. Salter said of Mr. Trump’s effect on the party, alluding to its dwindling base of white voters.

Mr. Salter echoed a widespread complaint, saying the news media were enabling Mr. Trump for the sake of ratings.

But Mr. Trump’s style is indisputably good TV, as his primary race opponents discovered. And his asymmetrical style of political warfare poses a threat to Democrats and their likely nominee, Hillary Clinton, one that may not be so easily neutralized by the usual tactics.

Already, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is testing out different responses — juggling how much to deploy the candidate herself and how much to outsource the fiercest counterattacks. It clearly has not yet settled on the most effective approach.

“I don’t think Hillary’s campaign should engage in this sort of stuff,” said James Carville, a Democratic strategist, referring to Mr. Trump’s shift toward conspiracy-mongering. “But the pushback from surrogates and the ‘super PAC’ world is going to be pretty damn hard.”

Anita Dunn, a former top aide to Mr. Obama, said “this is the time” for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign to determine how best to respond to Mr. Trump’s charges, noting that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is still in the race and that Mrs. Clinton will not effectively claim the Democratic nomination until at least June 7.

But at least in the short term, Mr. Trump’s willingness to hurl the most incendiary charges has given him an overwhelming advantage.

“He is winning the day,” Ms. Dunn said, “if you define winning the day by dominating the coverage.” She made clear that she did not.

In the next breath, though, Ms. Dunn wryly braced for more incoming. Half-jokingly imagining Mr. Trump dredging up the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., she said, “We haven’t heard ‘David Koresh’ yet.”

Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.

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