Alex Jones, America’s foremost purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories, was in a buoyant mood that day. He’d had Matt Drudge, the influential conservative news aggregator, on recently. But this was much bigger.
Trump wasted no time signaling that his mind-set aligned with the host’s. Trump said he wouldn’t apologize for asserting that large numbers of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the collapse of the twin towers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a claim that fact-checkers have repeatedly refuted.
“People like you and I can’t do that so easily,” the New York developer, speaking from his office in Trump Tower, said. He would later call Jones “a nice guy.”
The December interview would reverberate into the general election as Hillary Clinton tried to use it to paint Trump as an irresponsible crackpot associating with an irresponsible crackpot. It also pushed Jones, who operates the websites Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.com, from the realm of niche showman into the mainstream national dialogue. The man who said that the Newtown, Conn., school shooting was a “hoax” involving child actors and claimed that elements of the U.S. government were responsible for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building and for the 9/11 attacks had been granted an enormous new audience.
“I think Alex Jones may be the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media,” says Roger Stone, the Nixon-era political trickster who orchestrated Trump’s appearance on the show.
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