Even as He Rises, Donald Trump Entertains Conspiracy Theories

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It was a question that most major presidential candidates would have quickly dismissed as absurd, even offensive: What do you make of these theories that Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered?

For Donald J. Trump, it appeared unavoidably juicy, and possibly the next big pop-culture fixation. “You know, I just landed, and I’m hearing it’s a big topic,” Mr. Trump told the radio host Michael Savage from South Carolina, in an interview just a few days after the Supreme Court justice’s unexpected death. Even as he said he could not speak to whether a special commission should investigate the death, he added, “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”
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He has declared on a presidential debate stage that he knew a 2-year-old who immediately developed autism from a vaccination.
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He has appeared on the radio show of the noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has suggested that the government played a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
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He has said on Twitter that President Obama might have attended Justice Scalia’s funeral had it been held at a mosque, feeding into the pervasive rumor that the Christian president is actually a Muslim.
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And he shared with a rally crowd a dramatic story of a United States general executing Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, which has been dismissed as an Internet rumor.
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It was the “birther” theories that Mr. Trump used to stoke interest in his own potential candidacy in 2011. That year, he repeatedly demanded that Mr. Obama produce his Hawaiian birth certificate. In April of that year, he claimed to have sent investigators to the state: “They can’t believe what they’re finding,” he said, though he has never made public any such findings, and Mr. Obama later released his birth certificate.
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The candidate has used his Twitter feed to pass along other dubious theories, including false crime statistics about blacks 
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He questioned Senator Marco Rubio’s eligibility to be president. Mr. Rubio was born in the United States. Pressed about passing along such conjecture by the ABC News host George Stephanopoulos on Feb. 21, Mr. Trump gave a response he frequently uses to deflect responsibility for sharing inaccurate information. “Somebody said he’s not, and I retweeted it,”
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And an Internet rumor around the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks about Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center towers was cited as fact by Mr. Trump, who said that “thousands” of Muslims had hailed the attacks, spurring weeks of controversy in the fall. 
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at a South Carolina campaign event, Mr. Trump touched on the smoky theory that the identity of those who funded the attacks was still not publicly known. If he wins, he said, “you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center.”
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