Competing conspiracy theories consume Trump's Washington

Boston Globe

26-07-2025

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The harmonic convergence of competing conspiracies has overshadowed critical policy issues facing America's leaders at the moment, whether it's new tariffs that could dramatically reshape the global economy or the collapse of cease-fire talks meant to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The Epstein matter so spooked Speaker Mike Johnson that he abruptly recessed the House for the summer rather than confront it. The allegations lodged against Obama so outraged the former president that he emerged from political hibernation to express his indignation at even having to address them.
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The whispers and questions -- 'this nonsense,' as Trump put it -- followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed Friday for a visit to his golf club.
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'You're making a very big thing over something that's not a big thing,' he complained to reporters, suggesting, in his latest bid at conspiracy deflection, that instead of him, the news media should be looking at Epstein's other boldface friends like former president Clinton. 'Don't talk about Trump,' he said.
Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that the moon landings were faked, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job, or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.
Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, of course, or have some basis. But presidents generally have not been the ones spreading dubious stories. To the contrary, they traditionally have viewed their role as dispelling doubts and reinforcing faith in institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate his predecessor's murder specifically to keep rumors and guesswork from proliferating. (Spoiler alert: It didn't.)
Trump, by contrast, relishes conspiracy theories, particularly those that benefit him or smear his enemies without any evident care for whether they are true or not. 'There have been other conspiratorial political movements in the country's past,' said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories. 'But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.'
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During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump tied the father of one of his rivals, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, to the Kennedy killing, citing a photograph with Lee Harvey Oswald. During Trump's hush money trial in New York last year, his onetime compatriot David Pecker of The National Enquirer acknowledged under oath that the whole thing was made up to damage Cruz and elect Trump.
Unrepentant, Trump stuck to his false assertions about Obama's birthplace for years, only grudgingly admitting late in the 2016 campaign that his predecessor was in fact born in the United States.
'The president's repeated discussion of multiple conspiracy theories, most recently about the 2016 election, has no parallel in American politics,' said Meena Bose, director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University.
Conspiracy theories are not the exclusive preserve of Trump and the political right. Around the time of last month's anniversary of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa., some on the left once again advanced the notion that the whole shooting episode had been staged to make the Republican candidate into a political martyr.
Some Democrats have now dived into the Epstein fever swamp head-first, suddenly exercised by a closed case that had hardly been on the party's priority list just weeks ago as they pile on Trump and maximize his political troubles. After Roy Black, who was Epstein's defense lawyer, happened to die at age 80 this past week at the height of the furor over the case, some on the left saw suspicious timing.
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Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them.
He suggested the nation's gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing, resurrecting a decades-old fringe supposition, even though he would presumably be in position to know whether that was actually true, what with being president and all. 'If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset,' he told reporters.
It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly nonconspiratorial Treasury secretary, to burst the bubble and reassure Americans that, no, the nation's reserves had not been stolen. 'All the gold is present and accounted for,' he told an interviewer.
Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an act of transparency for historians and researchers that may shed important light on those episodes.
But Trump has gone beyond simple theory floating to make his own alternate reality official government policy. Some applicants for jobs in the second Trump administration were asked whether Trump won the 2020 election that he actually lost; those who gave the wrong answer were not helping their job prospects, forcing those rooted in facts to decide whether to swallow the fabrication to gain employment.
The past week or so has seen a fusillade of Trumpian conspiracy theories, seemingly meant to focus attention away from the Epstein case. Tulsi Gabbard, the president's politically appointed intelligence chief, trotted out inflammatory allegations that Obama orchestrated a 'yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy' by skewing the 2016 election interference investigation -- despite the conclusions of a Republican-led Senate report signed by none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton was 'on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers' during the 2016 campaign.
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Relying on this, Trump accused Obama of 'treason,' suggesting he should be locked up and going so far as to post a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and put behind bars. The idea of a president posting such an image of another president would once have been seen as a shocking breach of etiquette and corruption of the justice system, but in the Trump era it has become simply business as usual.
For all that, the conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Most of the files, the ones that his attorney general told him include his name, remain unreleased, bringing together an unlikely alliance of MAGA conservatives and liberal Democrats.
It was well known that Trump was friends with Epstein, although they later fell out. So it's not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean. But Trump is not one to back down. Asked last week about whether he had been told his name was in the files, Trump again pointed the finger of conspiracy elsewhere.
'These files were made up by Comey,' he told reporters, referring to James Comey, the FBI director he had fired more than two years before Epstein died in prison in 2019. 'They were made up by Obama,' he went on. 'They were made up by the Biden administration.'
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The theories are endless.
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