Alex Jones Says If Trump Is Insane 'We Need More of It'

President Donald Trump may be losing the confidence of congressional Republicans, as well as of many Americans willing to give him a chance but dismayed by the chaotic nature of his presidency. But he has one unflagging supporter who thinks the president is doing a fine job indeed: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who on Monday night offered a robust defense of the president while condemning the so-called Deep State, a shadowy cabal of bureaucrats supposedly intent on undermining the new administration.

Jones is frequently dismissed as a conspiracy theorist who peddles misinformation. However, he offers an important view into the thinking of some Trump supporters, who distrust the narratives promulgated by the mainstream media, whose outlets they suspected to be uniformly disposed against the current administration. For example, Jones's touting of the Pizzagate controversy (an alt-right obsession with the notion that Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child-trafficking scheme) led a North Carolina man in December to show up at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria with an assault rifle with intentions of "self-investigating" the story.

Jones issued a rare apology after the incident, but his fundamental approach to newsgathering and conspiracy-mongering--one and the same, to him--has not changed.

Shortly after revelations broke that Trump had personally leaked intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, Jones appeared in a Periscope video with the following title "Exclusive: The Plan to Overthrow Trump Revealed."

The video was taken on a busy urban intersection, filmed in what might be termed the cinéma vérité style. Next to Jones, dressed in his customary suspenders, stands a particularly faced Roger Stone, the former Richard Nixon heavy who, according to allegations, facilitated ties between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign.

Jones reiterated a simple point with characteristic force: Trump is a great president, while those who question him are unpatriotic puppets of a global elite. He said Trump would be deposed by a "bipartisan act of treason," which would be masterminded by National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster. (McMaster offered a muscular defense of Trump at Tuesday's daily White House press briefing.)

"What he is stalwart, strong, on point," Jones said of Trump. "He's bad because he won't roll over. He's mentally ill because he won't be influenced by a bunch of traitors and followers." Jones went on to say that Trump "does a good job" roughly 90 percent of the time.

This opinion is in opposition to that held by most American people, who increasingly disapprove of the Trump administration. His current approval rating, according to Gallup, is 38 percent. No modern American president has been this thoroughly disliked this early in his administration.

But according to Jones, and many Trump supporters, that is because even many of his supposedly loyalists are intent on stifling Trump. In his Monday night video, Jones alluded to a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos, published the previous week and titled "How Trump Could Get Fired." That could include impeachment, but also removal from office via the 25th Amendment, if Trump were judged no longer mentally fit for the presidency.

It is the suggestion that Trump is mentally ill and therefore incapable of executing the duties of his office that Jones and Stone were most eager to rebut. "They are going to claim that Donald Trump has Alzheimer's," Stone said, referring to the degenerative neurological disease. Stone said that he'd "talked to the president fairly recently. He's sharp as a tack. There is no evidence of any deterioration in his thought process." (Trump recently said on Twitter that he and Stone have not spoken "in a long time.")

Stone alluded to the way "Trump has the Chinese doing our dirty work in North Korea" as evidence of his competence and mental alacrity. He also referenced the health of the economy and the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court as further evidence that Trump is indeed restoring American greatness.

"If that's insane," Jones said. "We need more of it."

China has not, in fact, agreed to substantive changes in its policy toward North Korea, though it has suggested it will work with Trump to contain Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. As for the economy, most observers believe any credit for the rebound from the Great Recession belongs to Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama. And while it is true that Trump nominated Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, he almost certainly did so at the urging of congressional Republicans, since Trump is not known to possess much interest in federal judiciary.

Jones also pointed out that Trump works "20 hours a day," though evidence does not support that assertion. He also said Trump walks hills while playing golf, this supposedly being evidence of his physical fitness. In fact, Trump reportedly shuns exercise due to an incorrect belief that it harms well-being. Photographs have repeatedly shown him being driven in a golf cart.

"He is not perfect," Jones said of Trump. Few would disagree.

Stone reminded viewers--of which there have been 23,800 as of this writing--that Trump had "give up a fabulous lifestyle" to serve the people of America. "He has given up his golf game, by and large," Stone said.

Trump has not, in fact, given up his golf game. He has played golf 21 times since taking office, and he has spent 36 days at a Trump-branded property, according to tracking of the president's peregrinations by The New York Times.

"Globalists" and "slaves of globalism" were frequently invoked as the primary enemy seeking to remove Trump. Many in the alt-right have used that term for top Trump advisers Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. The insult is believed by many to be anti-Semitic, with its hint of the "rootless cosmopolitan" label with which Jews were branded in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

"Goldman Sachs is lined up universally to destroy Trump. He's brought Goldman Sachs in, and they're still trying to destroy him," Jones said in the video.

Goldman Sachs, the powerful lower Manhattan banking institution, is frequently used as shorthand for moneyed Jewish interests. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone once called the bank "vampire squid," in what some called an anti-Semitic image.

When Jones asked Stone how patriotic Americans could support their president, Stone said the best means to do so would be to use social media to share links from Infowars and Stone Cold Truth, Stone's own site. While that would surely help the proprietors of those sites, and their respective advertisers, it is not clear how it would save Trump's imperiled presidency.

At one point, a driver shouts at Stone and Jones from a passing car.

"Fuck you," he yelled, honking for effect. Jones looked back at the receding car, then continued his pro-Trump diatribe.