Conspiracy Theorists Are Turning On the President

The Atlantic

10-07-2025

The Trump administration had promised a bombshell. Americans, many of whom had spent years wondering over the unknowns in the Jeffrey Epstein case, would finally get their hands on the secret files that would explain it all. What really happened when the accused sex trafficker died in jail back in 2019? And who was on his 'client list'—a rumored collection of famous and powerful people who participated in Epstein's crimes?
In a September 2024 interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Donald Trump suggested that he would release the list if reelected. 'Yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein; I'd have no problem with it,' Trump said. He indulged speculation about Epstein after his reelection as well. In February, the White House hosted a collection of MAGA-world influencers and gave them binders full of heavily redacted Epstein-related documents labeled Phase 1, suggesting more to come.
The Trump administration has been unusually focused on messaging about such information, making a show of pulling the curtain back on supposed secrets. Trump similarly promoted the release of further documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, along with records on the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In an executive order signed this January, the administration framed these efforts as 'PROVIDING AMERICANS THE TRUTH.' At an April hearing on those files, Nancy Mace, a Trump ally and representative from South Carolina, brought up the so-called Epstein list. In a meandering statement, she spoke about her desire to see documents regarding Epstein, as well as Hunter Biden's laptop and the origins of the coronavirus. All have been recurring internet fascinations among Trump's supporters. 'Sunshine literally is the best medicine,' Mace argued.
A personal wish list of coveted secrets is not exactly the same thing as a principled call for government transparency. But the two are easy to conflate and can have some incidental overlap, which can be politically useful. The promise of previously withheld revelations has allowed Trump to frame himself as an outsider fighting on behalf of voters who have been kept in the dark by the establishment. The catch is that once he was back in office, he was put in the awkward position of having to deliver.
On Monday, the FBI released a memo saying that it had reviewed all of its files on Epstein and that it does not plan to release more after all; there will be no Phase 2. According to the FBI, only a 'fraction' of the remaining material would have become public if Epstein had lived to go to trial, because it includes 'a large volume' of illegal content involving underaged victims of sexual abuse—in other words, material that cannot be released to the public. The memo also noted, in one breezy paragraph, that the bureau's review had uncovered neither a client list nor evidence 'that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.' There will be no new investigation against 'uncharged third parties,' the memo said. This has come as a shock to a group of people who have long bought into the idea that Trump would one day unmask an evil ring of Democrats and liberal-coded celebrities.
Anna Paulina Luna, a representative from Florida and the chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which facilitated the recent document releases regarding JFK, told me that she will be asking the Department of Justice to authorize the release of more Epstein details anyway. 'I think the American people still have questions and there is stuff that they can release,' she said. She didn't comment specifically on the existence of a client list and said she didn't yet know exactly what kind of documents the FBI might still have (clarifying that she agreed that the bureau should not release any private details about victims or child-sexual-abuse material).
In the meantime, the about-face on the Epstein files is splintering MAGA world, and many Trump allies are feeling betrayed and unmoored. 'No one believes there is not a client list,' wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative from Georgia who has avidly promoted QAnon conspiracy theories. 'This is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,' one of the influencers who went to the White House in February, Rogan O'Handley (who goes by 'DC Draino'), told his more than 2 million X followers on Monday. Longtime Trump loyalists, including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, started sharing a meme on Monday that depicted a bunch of cartoon lizard people laughing about having pulled one over on the unsuspecting public yet again. Strange—some readers may be old enough to remember when it was Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who were the shadowy reptilian elite, secretly shedding their human skin whenever out of public sight.
Significant ire has been directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, who responded to a question about a client list in February by saying it was 'sitting on my desk right now to review.' During a press conference on Monday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Bondi had actually been referring to 'the entirety of all the paperwork' on Epstein and not to a specific document. Shortly thereafter, the online crowd began questioning why Leavitt had not been wearing her usual cross necklace at the briefing—a sign, perhaps, that she was lying and didn't want to do so in front of God (to paraphrase the posts, which were mostly ruder than that). When I asked Luna if Trump's supporters had a right to feel frustrated, she deflected the question, saying, 'I can't speak for people on the internet or the president. What I can say is President Trump is on the cusp of negotiating a permanent cease-fire with Israel and Hamas in Gaza. This is overshadowing the amount of success the administration has had in that sense.'
Yet this is undeniably a turning point for the highly online among Trump's base. The story of the client list had effectively morphed into a more palatable and plausible version of the QAnon conspiracy theory. As does QAnon, it features a secret ring of evildoers, though it doesn't have certain ostentatious elements of that conspiracy (no harvesting blood). But both theories encourage people to disbelieve everything the government tells them. Until now, Trump and his appointees were positioned as exceptions to that rule—the deal was that if they got back into power, they would reveal all.
From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q
Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida's law school who has written about government transparency and conspiracy theories, observed to me that, with his administrative appointments, Trump had made implicit promises to his supporters. 'He specifically nominated people for high-level positions who have been engaged in conspiracy theories for the past five-plus years,' Fenster pointed out. For instance, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have offered wild theories about the Epstein case in the past—Patel once suggested that the FBI may be covering up evidence to protect unnamed elites, while Bongino said he'd heard a rumor that Epstein was a foreign intelligence agent.
Now the conspiracy is mutating again to fit the administration's reversal. 'To hear Pam Bondi and to hear Kash Patel and Don Bongino saying there is no list—you're going to say, 'Well, they must be part of the conspiracy too,'' Fenster suggested, which is certainly one avenue people have gone down. Because the FBI's memo coincided roughly with a diplomatic visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, others have started suggesting that Epstein was secretly a Mossad agent (a claim often expressed with anti-Semitic rhetoric). Alex Jones, who was initially furious about the FBI memo, has since speculated that Trump has actually taken 'control' of the alleged list and is using it to blackmail the 'deep state' behind the scenes.
Of course, some have started picking apart the FBI memo itself. It concluded with links to two videos of a hallway in the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein had been held, showing that nobody went into his cell the night of his death. Viewers quickly noticed that the clock in the corner of the video skips from 11:59:00 to 12:00:00, which suggested to them that a minute of footage was missing.
On Tuesday afternoon, when a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about the foreign-intelligence theory and the video-clock issue, Trump cut in. 'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?' he asked incredulously. 'This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.' Bondi said she didn't mind answering the question, but Trump went on. 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas,' he said, referring to the flooding that has killed at least 120 people.
Eventually, he waved for Bondi to go ahead. She told the reporter she had no knowledge of Epstein being an agent, then explained that the video hadn't been doctored and that the clocks on the outdated cameras in the Metropolitan Correctional Center always jump ahead as they approach midnight. From what I saw, hardly anyone online was buying this explanation, which comes as no surprise. Trump and his administration invited conspiracy theories into the White House. Now they're going to have a hard time getting them out.