Donald Trump’s administration never exactly has things ‘together’. It was, at its peak, a deeply incompetent team of losers and weirdos. But ever since their loss to Biden in November, things have really come unhinged. From Rudy Giuliani’s inauspicious cameo in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm to Rudy Giuliani’s weird head leak to Rudy Giuliani’s drunk Michigan witness — wow, Giuliani had a year, huh? Anyway, the entire mainstream conservative movement has been taken over by incoherent conspiracy lunatics. How did this happen? For an answer, turn to Steven Soderbergh’s deeply bizarre 2009 masterpiece, The Informant!
Mark Whitacre is an executive at Archer Daniels Midland. It’s 1992, and life is good. He’s wealthy, with a beautiful wife and child. There’s just one problem: A virus that is screwing up a vital lysine operation, and his bosses are on his ass. And then there’s a Japanese extortionist. The FBI start investigating. And somehow, Mark finds himself informing on his own company in an international price fixing operation. Which may or may not exist. Also, he might be embezzling $500,000? It might be more than that.
“I know the identity of the master puppeteer.”
Early on, Mark displays a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking. Did ADM bug his house? It’s an idle thought, one that passes by without notice amidst a barrage of meaningless narration. But it turns out to be an important one. Mark has good reason to be paranoid. After all, he’s embezzling millions of dollars. He’s in the process of actively committing crimes. It’s important to realize that he doesn’t really have a plan. Just a certainty that 1) he’s done something wrong, 2) he can be caught at any moment, and 3) the only hope he has is to create so much confusion that his own misdeeds get lost in the shuffle.
When a lot of us think about criminal conspiracies, we tend to picture Professor Moriarty, Lex Luthor, or Ernst Blofeld. We think of old, rich White men, working behind the scenes to manipulate society. Geniuses, putting their talents towards evil. Their plans are vast and unknowable.
But evil, it turns out, is far more banal. The MAGA movement’s attempt to steal the election is less a coordinated masterplan and more something they bumbled into in an attempt to cover up a variety of other crimes. They’re winging it. First it was Sharpiegate, but that turned out to be too easy to disprove. Conspiracies need to be unfalsifiable, or at least offer plausible deniability of the evidence. The Dominion thing looked shaky at first, because it doesn’t make much sense — but, specifically because it doesn’t make sense, it’s harder to disprove. The confusion caused by the rapidly-changing, barely-coherent conspiracies isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. The greatest discovery of the Trump administration is that it’s easy to get caught for a crime; it’s much harder to get caught when you commit so many crimes that people aren’t even sure where to start untangling the web.
“You look at yourself as wearing a white hat, and they’re wearing black hats?”
Mark (and Trumpists) sees the world as black-and-white. There are good guys, and they’re good no matter what they do. There are bad guys, and they’re bad no matter what they do. Good and bad become things that you are, rather than things that you do. Mark was right — ADM was corrupt. They were fixing prices. He was happy to be a crusader to bring them to justice… though, admittedly, he seemed to do it largely because he wanted to take over the company and he hated his bosses. To Mark, this should forgive any of his misdoings. So a few million went missing. You should hear about what the other guy did!
Similarly, the basis behind some of the critiques MAGA supporters make isn’t wrong. Our government has been bought by an ultra-wealthy elite. That same elite does routinely flout the laws, including laws about child sexual predation, with near impunity. The working class has been dismissed, derided, and taken advantage of. They know something is wrong, but they aren’t sure what. But when they turn on the TV or hop on Facebook, the hear a single message hammered into their heads: It’s not us, it’s them. The Jews did it. The Left did it. Antifa did it. Immigrants did it. And if they’re doing all this, then anything you do to them should be fair game. Right?
Long after Mark has been caught stealing millions of dollars, he insists: Mick and Dwayne Andreas are behind it all. Why does it matter what he did, if it was in service of stopping them? There is no evidence that the Andreas’ were behind Mark’s embezzlement. Indeed, Mark later admits that they weren’t. But for years, he’s adamant: Yes, things have gone wrong, and yes, he did those things, but it wasn’t his fault! He was just playing the game.
“It’s just dump on Whitacre.”
That’s because, at its heart, conservatism has a powerful victimhood complex. The problem with ‘standing athwart history, yelling Stop’ is that it paints the conservative as a sole hero standing against the hordes. It needs to be the underdog. It needs to feel oppressed. The conservative movement has almost complete control of our societal wealth and culture. Capitalism, one of the ur-conservative values, is so baked into our culture that we spend trillions of taxpayer dollars every year to prop its fetid corpse up, a laughably bizarre Weekend at Bernie’s economy.
Ultimately, the reason The Informant! is the perfect movie for this moment is simple: Mark is more interested in being a victim than he is in doing anything. He wants attention more than he wants outcomes. And because of this, his crimes are deeply stupid. His lies are transparent and easy to find out… and yet, sometimes, he believes them himself. He just repeats them so often that it becomes part of his personal narrative, even though he knows it isn’t true.
Mark repeatedly tells people that his parents died when he was young. He says wealthy Ohio amusement park mogul adopted him. He even thinks that in the narration. But, we learn, this isn’t true. He made it up, because it was beneficial to him to do so. Hell, he even knew he was doing that. But still, when he thinks about himself, he thinks about himself as an orphan adopted by an amusement park mogul.
Alex Jones, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Ron Watkins — they know that Dominion and other election fraud conspiracies don’t make sense. But it’s beneficial. It makes them look like victims, and it gives them a story to cover up their crimes. That said, it’s important to realize that this is not a coordinated plan. These are not criminal masterminds. They’re just stupid, corrupt weirdos, lying frequently enough and rapidly enough to confuse people who aren’t paying attention.
“Why didn’t we know?”
That’s the other thing about The Informant! that rings true today. You can’t fact-check a conspiracy out of existence. For years after FBI agents Shepard and Herndon should have stopped believing Mark, they defended him. They did so because they liked him. They related to him. In the end, they only turned against Mark when he started publicly attacking them. That’s when their own internal story about him changed.
Because conspiracies are just that: Stories. You can (and should) fact-check the wild claims of these conspiracies. I do think it helps inoculate some people against them. But until build a more honest and equitable society, there will always be fertile soil for conspiracy. Shepard and Herndon needed to have their internal stories forcibly changed in order to recognize Mark for what he was: A lying grifter out to enrich himself.
The Informant! is, at its core, a funny movie about how much damage a single idiot can do if he knows how to never back down from a lie. If that’s not the perfect description of the Trump administration, I don’t know what is.