President Donald Trump has long been obsessed with gold, but recently, he’s become fixated on the gold held in the depository at Fort Knox and a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that its gold has somehow been stolen.
Trump took time away from his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House this past Monday to bring up his gold fixation.
“We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there. Because maybe somebody stole it,” he told Macron and reporters.
Trump surprisingly isn’t alone in this. MAGA loyalist Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also has gold fever.
“I will be calling the Treasury and arranging for the [House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency] to go and inspect the gold at Fort Knox,” she wrote on X on Monday.
But other than Trump bringing it up, neither Fort Knox nor the topic of gold security has been in the news recently. So why is gold top of mind for the leader of the United States and his acolytes?
This time, the source of the fixation appears to be Trump’s billionaire financier and co-President Elon Musk. Two weeks ago, the account for the conspiracy theory website Zero Hedge tagged Musk and asked him to “take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of U.S. gold is there.” The account falsely claimed that the “last time anyone looked was 50 years ago in 1974.”
Musk asserted that he thought the gold was reviewed each year, and Zero Hedge said this wasn’t the case. In response to Musk, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—son of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a conspiracy theorist and racist—called for an investigation of the gold supply.
These assertions are extra absurd in light of the fact that Steven Mnuchin, who was then Trump’s own treasury secretary, visited Fort Knox and took photographs with bars of gold in August 2017. And Mnuchin wasn’t alone on that trip. Joining him were U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza and a host of Kentucky Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Gov. Matt Bevin, and Rep. Brett Guthrie.
Still, following the “gold” exchange between Musk and the conspiracy website, the topic was raised over and over on Fox News and Fox Business, across multiple programs like “The Five,” “Jesse Watters Primetime,” “Gutfeld!,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and others, according to a Daily Kos search of TVEyes, a database of TV, radio, and online video.
Trump has often made decisions at the presidential level based on half-baked information (or outright falsehoods) that he absorbs via social media and Fox News, and his Fort Knox fixation seems to fall right in line with that.
But conspiracies about gold predate Trump’s time leading the Republican Party. For instance, in 2011, when he was representing Texas in the House, the aforementioned Ron Paul floated the notion that the bars of gold in the fort were fake and that they were just metal bars painted gold.
Conservatives have entertained all sorts of fevered dreams about the gold supply ever since America (and much of the rest of the world) went off the gold standard in 1971.
These conspiracies have also led to a lucrative market in fearmongering advertising and scams based on convincing conservatives to “invest” in gold, which is advertised as a stable commodity—particularly if their nightmare of a left-wing dominated world takes hold. Much of conservative media, from right wing radio to TV outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, is propped up by gold-related advertising.
Perhaps the perfect expression of all this was reflected in the scam uncovered earlier this month in which Trump fans were persuaded to put their money in a gold scam, hocked via AI-generated imagery of Trump.
Trump’s latest gold fixation is what happens when decades of right-wing conspiracy culture becomes intertwined with the mainstream Republican Party. By elevating a long-time conspiracy theorist like Trump to lead the party—and now the country again—gold fever was probably inevitable.
