As the Covid-19 death toll in the US nears 85,000, and President Trump criticizes coverage from even his biggest media champions, he is turning to ever more fringe voices to glean support.  

Over the past few days, Trump has been busy brewing one of the biggest tweetstorms of his presidency, posting 126 tweets on Mother’s Day and continuing at full pelt into the week.

The subject of Trump’s latest deluge of tweets has largely been new material about a fresh conspiracy theory called Obamagate. Even the president himself doesn’t seem to be clear on what Obamagate truly is. When asked by a reporter to elaborate this week, Trump refused, only saying: “You’ll be seeing what’s going on over the coming weeks.” 

This may be part of the strategy, explained Samantha North, a disinformation expert at Washington cyber security company Nisos. “The fact that the narrative is so vague and undefined is perhaps deliberate,” North said. “Conspiracy theorists really like to build a story with all these pieces and like to connect the dots in weird ways. Maybe the whole vagueness of Obamagate is giving them the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild,” she said, adding that the President’s usual stream of misleading and conspiracy-led tweets had strengthened into a torrent. “It’s on steroids.”