I think you can tell a tremendous amount about a person, intellectually and psychologically speaking, by the extent to which a person is willing to believe in conspiracy theories. I think most people fall somewhere on the spectrum of reasonable credulity, in which conspiracies that are supported by a great amount of evidence are believed or disbelieved based mainly on ideological predispositions.

On the other hand, there are certain people who just refuse to dismiss any conspiracy theory out of hand, no matter how insane it sounds. In fact, the more insane it sounds, the more they are willing to embrace it as being at least possibly true. In the modern era, no politician of any prominence was more willing to believe the most batsh*t insane conspiracy theories on earth than former Texas congressman and Presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Let’s review, just briefly, the things that Ron Paul either said or entertained as possibly true during the course of his 2012 Presidential campaign:

Let me just note something here that I’ve observed that’s true, and you can draw your own conclusions. Back several years ago, I knew a kindly old woman who had been happily married to her husband for over sixty years. They were not wealthy, had no appreciable savings, and in fact lived on a fixed income. One day out of the blue, he started accusing her of stealing his money, for no discernible reason. Whenever any new person was introduced to him, he would accuse the new person of being in league with his wife to steal all his money (he didn’t even really have any money to speak of to steal).

One day his wife had enough and actually took him to the doctor and wanted to know what was going on. On hearing this woman’s story, he immediately diagnosed her husband with Alzheimer’s induced dementia. See, connecting dots that ordinary people would not, in order to fit a pre-concocted tale in which people scheme nefariously for no valid reason is a hallmark behavior of those afflicted with organic brain dementia.

Why do I mention this? Well, because in addition to angrily muttering this morning about Ted Cruz’s father being involved in JFK’s assassination, Donald Trump has also during the course of this campaign dabbled in open 9/11 trutherism, has proved to be literally obsessed with birtherism as it relates to everyone in the United States, his ironclad belief in the conclusively discredited story of General Pershing with pig’s blood, and so on and so on.

Ideologically, Donald Trump and Ron Paul are really not all that much alike. But they have one important thing in common: you can’t identify a single conspiracy theory that anyone has ever confronted Donald Trump with, no matter how insane, and show that Donald Trump has refused to believe it.