“Google search trends prove it, and the guilty are sweating bullets like they are auditioning for a mob flick,” Gaetz said.
“Dumb criminals googling their crime,” conservative podcaster Josie Glabach, whose X account “Redheaded Libertarian” has more than 852,000 followers, posted on Sunday.
While Google data does show a surge in the relative popularity of particular search terms, the truth is less clear-cut than what is being portrayed in MAGA circles.
So what is actually going on in Washington, DC?
What do the claims have to do with Trump’s efforts to cut government spending?
The claims come as Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk are undertaking a sweeping review of the federal bureaucracy with the stated mission of rooting out waste, abuse, and fraud.
Some prominent MAGA figures, including Gaetz, have drawn a direct link between the Google data and Musk’s cost-cutting efforts via his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE has overseen the layoffs or resignations of tens of thousands of government employees and set in motion plans to dismiss potentially hundreds of thousands more.
Over the past month, Musk’s task force has cut employees at most government agencies, including the Department of State, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Some federal employees are now suing the US government through unions like the American Federation of Government Employees.
The cuts have reinforced many longstanding MAGA beliefs about corruption in the federal government.
Many MAGA supporters subscribe to the idea of a “Deep State”, the conspiracy theory that the US government is run by a secretive cabal of officials that is unaccountable to the US president or Congress.
As with other conspiracy theorists, MAGA supporters believe everything is “interconnected”, Mihaela Mihailescu, a PhD researcher at the University of Bath, focused on the politics of the internet
They believe that “Washington, DC, is in full-blown panic mode, with corrupt officials desperately searching for offshore bank accounts and legal loopholes as Trump ‘cleans house'”. Mihailescu said.
“The claim that a sudden surge in Google searches for terms like ‘RICO law’ and ‘Swiss bank’ indicates a widespread exodus of corrupt bureaucrats is based on little more than speculation—never mind that we have zero evidence that these searches are even coming from DC insiders,” she added.
A lack of evidence has been no obstacle to the spread of Deep State-related conspiracy theories in the past, including Q Anon and Pizzagate —which claimed, respectively, that Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of cannibalistic Satan worshippers and high-level members of the Democratic Party operated a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
