Competing conspiracy theories consume Trump’s Washington

Washington: OK, so President Donald Trump’s name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files. But who put it there? Could it possibly have been Barack Obama from his prison cell? Or a tranquillised Hillary Clinton? Oh wait, maybe it was etched onto the documents by Joe Biden’s magical autopen.

Or is that mixing up different scandals? It’s so hard to keep up with the latest wild notions circulating in the capital and beyond. Washington is awash in conspiracy theories these days, a cascade of suspicion and intrigue promoted or denied in the Oval Office, ricocheting around Capitol Hill and cable news and propelled at warp speed across social media.

Donald Trump speaks to reporters in Scotland on Friday.Credit: AP

No commander-in-chief in his lifetime has been as consumed by conspiracy theories as Trump, and now they seem to be consuming him. They have been the rocket fuel for his political career since the days when he spread the lie that Obama was secretly born overseas and therefore not eligible to be president. More than a decade later, Trump is coming full circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory with a new-and-improved one about Obama supposedly committing treason.

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 ceasefire 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.

The whispers and questions – “this nonsense”, as Trump put it – followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed on Friday for a visit to his golf club.

“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 Bill Clinton. “Don’t talk about Trump,” he said.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1997.Credit: Getty

“I’m not focused on the conspiracy theories that you are,” he added. True enough. He is focused on other conspiracy theories.

It says something about the evolution of politics in the Trump era that a sexual predator who has been dead for six years could suddenly dominate the national conversation again with little new information to change the essential understanding of the case. But then again, the allegations that the president raised against Obama regarding the Russian election interference investigation go back nine years and have been previously scrutinised without finding proof of the perfidy that Trump claims.

“There seems to be a natural human tendency to reduce complex reality by seeing masterminds behind every bad thing,” Michael Nelson, a presidential scholar at Rhodes College in Tennessee, said. “Trump has always played to that and now the Epstein scandal is rebounding on him.”

Indeed, Trump brought much of this on himself by encouraging dark views of the government that he derides as the “deep state”, views that prove hard to dispel now that the supposed deep state answers to him. The administration’s flip-flopping on whether it would release the Epstein files has fuelled talk of a cover-up, not only by Trump’s critics but by his own allies.

JFK in Dallas, Texas, on the day of his assassination on November 22, 1963.Credit: AP

Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that someone else had a hand in killing President John F. Kennedy, that the moon landings were faked, that the September 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five per cent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s assassination.

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 rumours 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,” Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories, said. “But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.”

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 one-time compatriot David Pecker of The National Enquirer acknowledged under oath that the whole thing was made up to damage Cruz and elect Trump.

Former president Barack Obama emerged from political hibernation to reject Trump’s claims about him.Credit: NYT

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. Trump nonetheless went on to falsely accuse Obama of spying on him, among other unfounded assertions. At one point, Trump spread the claim that Osama bin Laden was not actually dead and that Obama and Biden had the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed. He likewise casually accused a television anchor of murder.

“The president’s repeated discussion of multiple conspiracy theories, most recently about the 2016 election, has no parallel in American politics,” Meena Bose, the director of the Peter S. Kalikow Centre for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University, said.

“Presidential allegations that have no factual basis undermine public confidence in the political system and present dangerous challenges to constitutional principles and the rule of law, particularly if they are not subject to checks by other institutions.”

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, Pennsylvania, 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.

Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron at the British Museum in London this month.Credit: Bloomberg

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 maximise his political troubles. After Roy Black, who was Epstein’s defence lawyer, happened to die at age 80 this past week at the height of the furore over the case, some on the left saw suspicious timing.

America’s conspiracy craze has also drawn in foreign allies in recent days. President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife, Brigitte, this past week filed a defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Candace Owens, a far-right YouTube commentator known for antisemitic rhetoric, for repeatedly claiming that the French first lady is actually a man.

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.

The US depository for gold reserves at Fort Knox, Kentucky, pictured in 1974.Credit: nna\advidler

It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly non-conspiratorial 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 Reverend 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.

Trump has likewise claimed that Biden was so diminished toward the end of his term that his aides signed pardons without his knowledge using an autopen. Biden was certainly showing signs of age, but the autopen story was conjecture. Asked if he had uncovered proof, Trump said, “I uncovered, you know, the human mind. I was in a debate with the human mind and I didn’t think he knew what the hell he was doing.”

An automatic signing machine, known colloquially as an autopen.Credit: AP

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 “years-long 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 tranquillisers” during the 2016 campaign.

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 paedophiles. 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.”

The theories are endless.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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