For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
In January, three days after President Donald Trump began his second term, he issued an executive order to declassify files related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It looked like catnip for conspiracy theorists. A fact sheet accompanying the order said that it was “PROVIDING AMERICANS THE TRUTH AFTER SIX DECADES OF SECRECY.” But many Trump fans are far more concerned with what they see as six years of secrecy around Jeffrey Epstein, the incarcerated pedophile who, in 2019, depending on what you believe, either killed himself or was murdered to protect the sprawling network of sex offenders who had participated in his crimes. In February, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, was asked on Fox News whether she might release a supposed list of Epstein’s “clients.” Bondi said that it was sitting on her desk for review. The following week, she shared a tranche of documents related to Epstein, and gave right-wing influencers an advance look. They brandished binders outside the White House. The covers read “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
The files, however, were a bust, consisting mostly of uninteresting or already public information. Bondi suggested that there was more to come, but a few months later Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Dan Bongino, his deputy—both of whom stoked suspicions about Epstein’s death in past lives as right-wing pundits—went on Fox and awkwardly insisted that Epstein did kill himself after all. Then, last week, Axios reported that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had signed off on a memo that not only concluded there was no evidence that Epstein was murdered but also stated that federal investigators had found no support for the claims that he blackmailed powerful people or maintained a list of clients; the memo also said that further disclosure would not be “appropriate or warranted.” Bondi, seated next to Trump at an event last week, sought to clarify the remarks she had made on Fox, insisting that she had been talking not about a “client list” but about the Epstein case as a whole. For his part, Trump—who indicated on the campaign trail last year that he would be open to releasing Epstein-related files—sounded incredulous that people were still talking about them. In a subsequent post on Truth Social, he dismissed the story as a waste of time, calling it something “nobody cares about.”
And yet, by this point, many of Trump’s supporters had established that they still care very much about Epstein, and were not willing to move along. Elon Musk—who, while in the process of blowing up his relationship with the President, recently accused Trump of being implicated in the Epstein files—went on the attack again; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was so distraught at the Trump Administration’s involvement in the Epstein coverup that, he said, he was “physically going to puke.” Last weekend, MAGA influencers beat the Epstein drum at a conference organized by the right-wing group Turning Point USA. After that, it looked like the story might finally be losing momentum; Charlie Kirk, Turning Point’s founder, whom Trump had reportedly called after the conference, suggested that he was willing to trust the Administration and that he would stop talking about Epstein for the time being. But he didn’t, and neither did other prominent Republicans. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, normally about as Trump-sycophantic as one can be, said that the Administration “should put everything out there.”
Recently, in this column, I’ve explored other apparent cracks in the MAGA coalition, over whether to strike Iran and what to do about federal spending; last month, I described the Iran debate as the “apex” of media chatter about a MAGA civil war. Already, Epsteingate has reached a higher peak. The disputes about Iran and spending were nuanced, but they revolved around legible ideological distinctions: Iran hawkery vs. America First; deficit hawkery vs. Whatever Trump Wants First. When it comes to Epstein, the dividing lines are murkier. Journalists at The Bulwark and Politico attempted to delineate the Epstein factions within MAGA and came up, respectively, with five and eight distinct groupings, the names of which—“Israel Skeptics,” “Show-Trial Compromisers,” “Cabal Accommodationists”—will make little sense to those not steeped in Epstein lore. On Iran, I argued that the most troubling division for Trump might not have been between different MAGA diehards but between people who pay close attention to politics and the casuals who lent him support last year, and who generally seemed skeptical of the strikes. This time, all of the above seem to be furious. The most salient divide is between outsiders and insiders; the latter category includes figures such as Bondi and Bongino, who are in turn blaming each other for the mess. Trump hasn’t always been the focus of the blowback. But, strikingly, he hasn’t been spared it, either.
If the Epstein blowup is revealing of Trump’s base—indicating that its worship of him is not unconditional but predicated on the idea that he’s a tribune of the people seeking to expose nefarious élites—it is also revealing of Trump himself, and his relationship to conspiracy theories, in particular. Over the years, Trump has not only amplified all sorts of lies but made a generalized distrust of élites and institutions a key building block of his political success. Since he returned to power, these trends have, in some ways, only become more visible. But, as Trump’s reaction to the Epstein files suggests, it’s an oversimplification to say that the President has never heard a conspiracy theory that he didn’t embrace, or that he has invented a cohesive post-truth movement. Figuring out why requires some theorizing of our own.
In 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous essay for Harper’s Magazine about what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter argued that a mix of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” has long manifested in public life—including eighteenth-century speculation about the “allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati” and the McCarthyism of the nineteen-fifties—and that such passions have not merely been the preserve of the political right. The Epstein panic appears distinctly Hofstadterian. Earlier this week, a poll commissioned by CNN found that just three per cent of Americans are satisfied with what the Administration has shared about Epstein—and that more Democrats than Republicans are dissatisfied. Democratic élites are beating the Epstein drum, too. Whether they are true skeptics or merely spy an opening to troll Trump is open to debate, but some of their rhetoric has sounded pretty paranoid either way. (Hank Johnson, a congressman from Georgia, picked up a guitar and sang, “Epstein died by suicide / Believe that and you must be blind,” to a tune by Jason Isbell.) Given that the Democrats are supposed to be the party holding the line against the post-truth age, I’ve found some of this a little disconcerting.
Still, Hofstadter’s diagnosis of the paranoid style, as performed by right-wingers of his time—rooted in the feeling that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind”—clearly applies most closely, in today’s terms, to the MAGA movement. And Hofstadter’s description of “the paranoid spokesman,” who “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” would seem to have foreshadowed Trump himself. But, it turns out, Trump does not always fit that description. Indeed, he has not only tried to move past the Epstein story but has himself effectively dismissed it as paranoia. “I don’t understand what the interest or what the fascination is, I really don’t,” he said, this week. “It’s sordid, but it’s boring.” The next day, he referred to “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
So what explains the discrepancy? One theory holds that, although Trump and those in his circle weaponized conspiracy theories—which are expressions, typically, of anti-establishment grievance—to gain power, they must now exercise that power in the real world, and are finding that doing so butts up against their irresponsible past rhetoric, be that the discovery that whipping up distrust of FEMA turns out to be unhelpful when a natural disaster strikes, or the complications that follow from promising to expose a scandal that doesn’t exist. In trying to walk back that rhetoric, they have found themselves caught in a trap of their own design. (Conspiracy theorists generally don’t like hearing people in power tell them that there’s “nothing to see here,” even when it comes from supposed allies.) This theory would tally with other actions that the Administration has taken since Trump returned to office: for example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s vaccine-skeptical Health and Human Services Secretary, appeared to endorse a measles shot amid an outbreak in Texas, and the Environmental Protection Agency debunked the idea that the government is spraying harmful “chemtrails” into the sky. Then again, this theory struggles to explain why the Administration teased the Epstein files in the first place, and has endorsed all sorts of other conspiracies. Trump’s Truth Social post telling people to move on from Epstein seemed to invent a different conspiracy theory—that a cabal of his political opponents dreamed up the Epstein files—and he has continued to beat that drum ever since. He also urged Bondi to focus on what really matters: investigating how the 2020 election was stolen.
Another theory might hold that Trump amplifies those conspiracy theories that benefit him politically—that the 2020 election was stolen, for example—and downplays those that don’t. You don’t have to believe that the Epstein files are hiding some new dark secret about Trump to apply that logic here: it’s common knowledge that he knew Epstein, and he is on the record talking about Epstein’s preference for women “on the younger side”; any news cycle that dredges that back up is unlikely to make Trump happy. (On Thursday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2003, Trump contributed a “bawdy” message to an album for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday; Trump angrily denied this and threatened to sue the Journal.) And, though it’s true Trump said before taking office that he would be inclined to release files related to Epstein, he didn’t sound that enthusiastic about the idea. (“You don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there,” he told Fox, evincing uncharacteristic concern for other people’s lives. “There’s a lot of phony stuff in that whole world.”) Yet this theory doesn’t explain why Trump routinely endorses lies that don’t seem to have much to do with him, such as the idea that white South African farmers need refugee status to escape a genocide, for example.
Instead, I favor a third theory, which is that Trump’s approach to conspiracy theories is inconsistent, and makes little sense. (This is fitting, given that conspiracy theories are often inconsistent and make little sense.) This theory is compatible with aspects of the others—it is harder to convincingly peddle conspiracy theories when you’re in power, and Trump certainly is self-interested—but it holds that Trump’s attitude toward any given theory is likely guided by a mix not only of these factors but by whom he last spoke with, what information he has consumed on a given day, and so on. Musk, Tucker Carlson, and the golfer Gary Player all seem to have influenced his South Africa fixation; earlier this year, Trump appears to have become convinced that a wrongfully deported migrant had a gang tattoo when he didn’t. Maybe Trump doesn’t want the Epstein files out because he’s covering them up. But maybe, as the Times suggested this week, he was slow to grasp his base’s fury because Epstein conspiracism is a Very Online phenomenon, and he is an old man who principally consumes newspapers and TV. Trump’s views are idiosyncratic, and his attention is prone to wander. Sometimes he looks less like the leader of some programmatic conspiracy cult—or the “paranoid spokesman” of Hofstadter’s essay—and more like an ignorant blowhard. And not just on Epstein.
Before writing his essay on the “paranoid style,” Hofstadter gave a similar lecture at Oxford University, in November, 1963. The next day, J.F.K. was assassinated, spawning decades of conspiracy theories. In the past, Trump has flirted with these. While running for President in 2016, he falsely insinuated that the father of his primary rival, Ted Cruz, was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin. After taking office for the first time, Trump allowed a trove of J.F.K. files to be released. This year, he dumped more information into the public domain, fulfilling the promise of his early order—an act, as I wrote at the time, that could be seen as an encouragement toward conspiratorial thinking in itself, whatever was actually in the files.
But Trump’s attack on Cruz’s father seemed driven less by the zeal of the skeptic than by a petty desire to settle scores. (“This was just in response to some very, very nasty—I mean, honestly very nasty—remarks that were made about me,” he said at the time.) And, if he made it a priority to declassify the J.F.K. files, he didn’t—at least not explicitly—use their disclosure as a wedge to fuel further distrust of the government, as a full-bore conspiracy entrepreneur might have done. Asked about the files by a right-wing podcaster, Trump suggested that he believes that Oswald did indeed pull the trigger, and—while acknowledging the persistent question as to whether the assassin had help—concluded that “the papers have turned out to be somewhat unspectacular,” which might be “a good thing.” None of this is to say that Trump isn’t hugely responsible for mainstreaming conspiratorial thinking or eroding the notion of the truth; he is. But he is playing with older forces beyond his control. And, perhaps, his comprehension. ♦
