President Donald Trump has an impressive track record as a conspiracy theorist. He claimed, without evidence, that “millions” of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton. He offered dark speculations about the deaths of Vince Foster and Antonin Scalia. He intimated that Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, citing the National Enquirer as his source. He sees sinister forces directing the flight of Syrian refugees and Mexican immigrants. He has praised talk-show host Alex Jones, a man whose elaborate demonology incorporates everyone from the Bavarian Illuminati to Justin Bieber. Trump’s rise to power even began with a conspiracy theory: the accusation that Barack Obama hid the true circumstances of his birth.

We generally expect conspiracy theories to take hold among the more excitable elements of the political opposition. But Trump shows no sign of ceasing his conspiracist commentary now that he’s president. He may even get some help from his inner circle, having spent the transition recruiting a long roster of conspiracy-minded figures to his administration. Mike Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, believes that Islamist infiltrators are poised to subject America to sharia law. Steve Bannon, still Trump’s chief strategist, helped establish the Breitbart web site as the go-to wellspring for paranoid right-wing memes. HUD secretary Ben Carson blames “neo-Marxist” plotters for subverting the traditional heterosexual family. K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, once accused Hillary Clinton of sending helicopters to spy on her home.

All this high-level fearmongering has prompted many in the media to suggest that we’re entering an unprecedented era of presidential paranoia. Mother Jones dubbed Trump the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” declaring that he has “made the paranoid style of American politics go mainstream.”

But the paranoid style was already mainstream. The sorts of sinister stories that Trump favors have never been the exclusive preoccupation of marginalized political opponents. Indeed, there’s a long history of presidents and their inner circles obsessing about malevolent cabals. What’s different about Trump isn’t the fact that he talks about dubious conspiracies. It’s the way he talks about them.

Our leaders’ fear of conspiracies predates the birth of the country. The Founding Fathers declared independence in part because they believed that England’s effort to tighten control over its colonies concealed a more malicious agenda. In the words of future president George Washington, there was “a regular Systematick Plan” to make the colonists “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”