#2890: John Gibbs

John Gibbs is wingnut politician, political commentator (e.g. for The Federalist) and conspiracy theorist. During the first Trump term, Gibbs enjoyed roles in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and as part of the 1776 Commission, and he was acting Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Community Planning and Development. In July 2020, Trump also nominated him to the position of director of the United States Office of Personnel Management, but he was never confirmed by the Senate. Gibbs was also the GOP nominee for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district in the 2022 elections, where he lost in a landslide, presumably because a sufficient number of voters actually recognized him as stupid, evil and insane. He was nevertheless appointed county administrator by the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners in 2023, and was predictably fired a relatively short time later due to gross misconduct (Gibbs had “been dishonest, committed gross misconduct, and/or committed willful malfeasance”)

 

As a conspiracy theorist, Gibbs has been an aggressive champion of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and he made such conspiracy theories a centerpiece of his 2022 Michigan campaign. Gibbs explicitly denied that Joe Biden had been legitimately elected in 2020, and falsely claimed that the 2020 election results were “mathematically impossible”: His reasoning for the latter claim was that Trump won a number of “bellwether states” – states whose results have historically aligned with the general result – yet allegedly fail to win the general election, and the fact that Trump received a larger number of votes in 2020 than in 2016 (“President Trump got something like 15-20% more votes than he got the first time yet still lost, which is probably mathematically impossible”). Gibbs’s understanding of “mathematically impossible”, “probably” and how elections (or anything else) actually work seems to be tenuous at best.

 

It must be pointed out, though, that Gibbs had, even prior to his government appointments, a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, including the ones that would subsequently form the basis for the QAnon movement. For instance, Gibbs has repeatedly asserted that John Podesta took part in a “Satanic ritual” as part of a larger Satanic conspiracy involving numerous politicians and celebrities; during his 2020 Senate hearings, Gibbs said, of his comments, that “I regret that it’s unfortunately become an issue,” which is not only very far from being any kind of apology but in itself a very strange thing to say.

 

During his student days, Gibbs founded a “think tank” called the Society for the Critique of Feminism, where he reached the conclusion that women do not “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern” and that women’s suffrage had made the US into a “totalitarian state.” In a characteristically self-undermining manner, his group also said that men were smarter than women because men are more likely to “think logically about broad and abstract ideas in order to deduce a suitable conclusion, without relying upon emotional reasoning” and concluded that women should not have the right to vote. When Gibbs’s role in the group came to light during his 2022 campaign, a spokesperson quickly claimed that the group was created as a satire to troll the libruls on campus, a claim not supported by anything.

 

Diagnosis: A proud Christian nationalist with the reasoning skills and personal integrity to match. Hopefully gone for good, though there are more than enough similar idiots ready to take his place.