President Donald Trump has lengthy been obsessive about gold, however just lately, he’s grow to be fixated on the gold held within the depository at Fort Knox and a right-wing conspiracy principle alleging that its gold has in some way 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 advised 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.
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 annually, and Zero Hedge mentioned 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—referred to 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 images 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 number of Kentucky Republicans, together with Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Gov. Matt Bevin, and Rep. Brett Guthrie.
Gold bars are saved on the U.S. Depository in Fort Knox in Kentucky.
However conspiracies about gold predate Trump’s time main the Republican Occasion. 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 desires in regards to the gold provide ever since America (and far of the remainder of the world) went off the gold commonplace in 1971.
Maybe the proper expression of all this was mirrored within the rip-off uncovered earlier this month wherein Trump followers had been persuaded to place their cash in a gold rip-off, hocked through 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 Occasion. By elevating a long-time conspiracy theorist like Trump to guide the get together—and now the nation once more—gold fever was in all probability inevitable.
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