Donald Trump accuses Google of conspiracy

The Republican nominee lashes out in the wake of his poor debate showing and hints at more attacks on the Clintons’ marriage

Donald Trump has gone on the offensive after his underwhelming debate performance by criticizing debate moderator Lester Holt as biased and accusing Google of a conspiracy to rig search results in favor of Hillary Clinton. The Republican Nominee touted a long-debunked conspiracy theory that the most popular internet search engine suppresses negative headlines about his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton,” Trump said, apparently referring to Google searches during the first presidential debate on Monday night. Trump launched the latest salvo of attacks in an interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly where he claimed that the debate moderator Lester Holt “was much, much tougher on me than he was on Hillary”. Trump said that while initially “I said good things right after the show” he had changed his mind about Holt’s performance “after seeing the way he badgered and even the questions I got”. In particular, Trump expressed his discontent over the fact that Holt asked him “the birther question” in Monday’s debate. Trump had long falsely claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, an accusation widely considered to be a racist dogwhistle. Although Trump only recently acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States in an event at a Washington hotel, he falsely blamed Hillary Clinton for the conspiracy theory’s origin. He since said that he only acknowledged Obama’s actual birthplace in order to “get on with the campaign”.