Ezra Klein begins one of his recent podcasts by telling a joke that has been making the rounds. Basically, a conspiracy theorist dies and ascends to heaven. God is there to greet him and explains that as part of the celestial welcome, he will answer any question the man has.
“Please, I must know the answer to this one,” the man says, “who killed John F. Kennedy?” God answers instantly, “That’s easy: Lee Harvey Oswald.” Shocked, the man murmurs, “This goes higher than I had thought!”
This is the dilemma in which Donald Trump finds himself. Whatever he does to deflect and distract from the Jeffrey Epstein morass only deepens the suspicions — including those about the two men’s relationship.
According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 69% of Americans, including 62% of Republicans, believe the government is hiding Epstein’s alleged client list. This is understandable; there are so many unanswered questions about Epstein. How did he become so rich? What is in the mountains of computer files and videos recovered from his homes and properties? Since he had already tried to commit suicide once while in jail, why was he not monitored properly afterward?
But there is a larger problem for Trump. Since the “birther” charges against Barack Obama, he has encouraged, ridden and profited from a wave of conspiracy theories that accused the so-called deep state of all kinds of crimes, which were then quickly covered up.
Now he presides over that very state and has control of all the secrets. Why will he not reveal them?
Conspiracy theories have a long and rich history in the United States. Americans lived as second-class citizens of the British Empire, far from the center of authority in London. They imagined all kinds of plots being hatched in London to keep them subordinate and servile. That turned into what the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 called “the paranoid style in American politics,” with periodic eruptions of rabid fear of Freemasons, Catholics, Jews, bankers and communists.
Joseph McCarthy defined the modern age of conspiracy theory, charging that the American government had been taken over by traitors and spies for foreign powers.
The journalist Anna Merlan brought the story up to date in a deeply reported 2019 book, “Republic of Lies,” in which she argued that in recent decades, conspiracy theories entered into mainstream politics. Unlike earlier eras when conspiracy theorists were mostly powerless outsiders, they are now central — and increasingly normalized — figures in American political and cultural life.
Donald Trump is the main character in this story, having come to power and returned to power after aggressively promoting birtherism, election fraud and many other conspiracies. He has also brought into the mainstream people like Alex Jones and Kash Patel, who have trafficked in even more extreme theories and insinuations. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, spread the lie that Hillary Clinton was connected to child sex rings.
The challenge for Trump is that, having long fanned the flames of anti-statism and anti-elitism, he now sits in the White House, running the state and its elites. His administration has released thousands of files about the murders of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
There were no smoking guns revealing any major conspiracy, but no one in the administration can quite bring themselves to admit that. It would suggest that prior administrations and elites had not in fact been lying to the American people. But to do that is to lose credibility with their base.
Trump is an artful politician who knows how to handle his base. But this time it is proving tough even for him — perhaps because he clearly had some kind of relationship with Epstein. He has tried to deflect attention by raising other conspiracy theories — chiefly, that Obama tried to organize a coup against him.
He brought up old allegations about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But they all have the feeling of desperation about them.
As Charlie Warzel notes in The Atlantic, on July 20, when the questions about Epstein were mounting, Trump posted on Truth Social 33 times. He demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Redskins and shared an AI-generated video of Obama being handcuffed by the FBI in front of a smiling Trump in the Oval Office.
Patel, the FBI director, recently claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he has found a secret vault in the FBI, full of dark secrets no one had ever seen. Forget about Epstein, they seem to be saying; it turns out there are hundreds more conspiracy theories to dangle in front of the MAGA faithful.
Trump’s ferocious response to the Epstein affair will likely only deepen the public’s distrust toward institutions and politicians, create more online radicalization, and further hollow out our polarized political ecosystem. But he is playing with fires that may for the first time, if not consume him, then burn him badly.
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