Donald Trump is fighting a conspiracy the only way he knows how

Washington Post

17-07-2025

Conspiracy theorists tend to be collectors: One conspiracy is never enough. Our conspiracy theorist in chief has speculated that Barack Obama and Nikki Haley weren't born in the United States, that vaccines cause autism, that voting machines miscounted the results of the 2020 presidential election, and more.
Now, President Donald Trump is trying to bury one conspiracy theory under another. The most lurid speculation about Jeffrey Epstein holds that he sexually trafficked girls to many powerful people and blackmailed them, and that his apparent suicide was actually a murder committed at the behest of some of them. Connections to Mossad are hinted at but never substantiated.
The president's supporters, including some top officials he has appointed, have kept this controversy alive. Trump himself, even though he was the official ultimately in charge of the federal jail where it happened, cast doubt on whether Epstein had killed himself. But now, Trump is facing accusations of covering up the story himself, along with new attention to his own ties to the deceased sex criminal.
It's therefore time, Trump says, to stop talking about Epstein. The lingering questions are a 'scam' and a 'hoax' spread by the president's enemies, who he said 'made up' the so-called Epstein files and then didn't release anything incriminating while they were in power for reasons he hasn't quite yet articulated. Trump's theory has even less evidence going for it than the one he wants us all to forget (although Democrats, overjoyed at the rift in Trump's ranks, are certainly fanning the controversy now).
The fact Trump used to exploit, and now frustrates him, is that conspiracy theories are as hard to eradicate as a contagious disease. They offer the allure of secret knowledge — you're not one of the sheeple who accept whatever NASA tells you — and entry into the community that knows the truth. They provide satisfying, if inaccurate, answers to vexing mysteries. (Why does my child have autism? Why do my neighbors support a politician I do not?)
It helps that powerful people do, sometimes, conspire, all the more under a relaxed definition of 'powerful' and 'conspire.' Any network of like-minded political activists can be described as a conspiracy. They are people who, to go back to the roots of the word, breathe together. What makes 'conspiracy theory' a pejorative term is the frequent reliance on implausible feats of coordination and secret-keeping by the conspirators, together with the assumption of the worst possible motives for them.
Yet even the most far-fetched theories usually have some basis, however tenuous, in fact. Epstein really was a predator who hobnobbed with the rich and famous. Conspiracy obsessives often have a better handle on these facts than normal people. They have more motivation to keep track of them. Every few days, I see left-leaning people posting on Facebook that Trump wasn't shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year; I guarantee some of them are more familiar with the forensic reports than most of us.
And what the non-conspiracist sees as random and unrelated facts fit, for the conspiracist, into a memorable pattern. New discoveries, or 'discoveries,' can be slotted into the structure of the theory. The well-versed conspiracy theorist can often beat you in a debate.
A good conspiracy theory accommodates developments that appear to run counter to it. If authorities investigate and find the theory baseless — even authorities who previously entertained the theory — that just means someone got to them. Too bad, FBI Director Kash Patel.
Conspiracy theories are easy to build up and difficult to tear down. Institutions, the other way around. Trump, who uses the former to smash the latter, is upset that his 'PAST supporters' won't take the word of once-vaunted sources such as the Justice Department that he has continuously derided.
Trump did not begin this demolition. It is no accident — see how easy it is to slip into the language of conspiracy? — that these theories have gained purchase at the same time that institutions, including the media, have lost public confidence. Those institutions require trust, and they build it when they work well. Conspiracy theories reflect the corrosion of that trust and corrode it further.
When that trust has declined enough, no elaborate theory is needed. You can just make wild assertions or 'ask questions.' When Trump casually suggested that Justice Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, he did not even bother to fill out the story he was conjuring.
Trump's attempt to spin a new conspiracy theory to snuff out an old one might just be a matter of habit. But he might also have made the judgment, at least implicitly, that in a distrustful age the only way to beat a conspiracy theory is with another one. If, that is, it can be beaten at all.