President Donald Trump is no stranger to conspiracy: He rose to political prominence by touting the racist lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. His team isn’t either: Take Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s longtime baseless conviction that childhood vaccines cause autism or the billionaire Elon Musk’s promotion of the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.

The embrace of conspiracy theories isn’t new, but now that Trump is back in power, there is a direct pipeline between online conspiracy theories and government policy — and in some cases, it’s happening at breathtaking speed.

At times, the administration takes a kernel of truth and then distorts it wildly. At others, it’s entirely unclear where the theories are coming from. Here are four examples of this government by conspiracy theory:

1) No, USAID didn’t secretly bribe media outlets for pro-Democratic coverage

Musk has targeted both Politico and Reuters as news organizations, posting screenshots from a database of government payments and falsely claiming that their newsrooms received millions in federal grants. The Trump administration has cited those payments as examples of government waste and evidence that the federal government is supporting anti-Trump media.

In actuality, the federal government as a whole paid millions for employee subscriptions to Politico Pro, which offers “specialist reporting, data analysis, and expert briefings covering 22 policy areas” for an audience including industry stakeholders and government officials. These aren’t grants, but instead are purchases of subscriptions.

But baseless speculation that Politico received and depended on government grants grew online after the company missed payroll due to an unrelated technical issue. Within days, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform,........

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