The Conspiracists Are Inside the Building!
DONALD TRUMP RAISED THE WHITE FLAG on Sunday night by giving House Republicans carte blanche to vote for the impending resolution to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“I DON’T CARE,” the president wrote on TruthSocial.
Then on Monday, Trump went even further, saying he would sign the bill releasing the Epstein files if it gets through Congress, which it appears likely to do.
With Trump, it’s never clear how firm these sorts of offhand commitments are, if he means them seriously at all. But his current position on the Epstein files cannot be categorized as anything other than a retreat, coming after months of pretending only “weaklings” would be interested in them. It also doubles as something else: an admission that his administration’s agenda has been swallowed up by the conspiracy theories he and his allies helped create.
The Epstein estate emails released last week by the House Oversight Committee1 offered new proof that something very weird was going on with Trump’s friendship with the now-deceased sex-trafficking pedophile. The revelations in those emails made it untenable for Trump simply to wait out the headlines, as he has done countless times before—like, say, on the stories of Qatar gifting him a plane or ICE chief Tom Homan’s alleged $50,000 bribe.
Why was this one different? Precisely because Trump allies had said for years that the Epstein documents would implicate Democrats, leaving MAGA salivating for the revelations.
No one has channeled the backlash Trump is facing better than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Greene was once so riled up about Epstein and child sex-trafficking networks that she became a hardcore QAnon believer, debating the meaning of various Q “drops” online. But now, disillusioned by Trump’s position on releasing the files, she has become an outspoken critic. And an unapologetic one too, even as Trump has rescinded his support for her and levied churlish insults her way.
Not so long ago, landing on Trump’s enemies list would be the end of a Republican lawmaker’s career. But Greene has managed to stand up to the president so far, and right-wing media figures have for the most part not echoed Trump’s charges against her.
Instead, they see Trump’s actions—as well as his attacks on Epstein discharge petition cosponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) for his recent remarriage, an especially bizarre criticism coming from Trump, of all people—as more proof that this presidency is not going well. After one Republican congressman vowed not to vote to release the Epstein files, Steve Bannon acolyte Raheem Kassam moaned that the GOP was “sprinting full pace” toward a disastrous showing in next year’s midterms.
“Trump launched nukes at Massie and MTG this morning while golfing with Lindsey Graham,” conservative pundit Clint Russell wrote on X. “Trump is telling you exactly who he is. Please listen.”
BUT THE EPSTEIN STORY is not just a singularly hard crisis for this White House to navigate. It’s symptomatic of a larger problem vexing the administration. The president is being undermined by conspiracy theories from all quarters, including ones who are far crazier than those having to do with Epstein.
Take the recent flare-up on the right over the online activity of Thomas Crooks, who attempted to kill Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania. Ever since the assassination attempt, Republicans have fumed over the FBI saying Crooks left behind only a slim online profile. That made it harder to blame Democrats or any kind of organized leftist network for the shooting. The frustration crested this past week as Tucker Carlson accused law enforcement agencies of systemically covering up, or outright lying to the public about, Crooks’s background.
The anger grew so intense that Kash Patel’s FBI launched a “rapid response” account on X, seemingly aimed in large part at rebutting Carlson. On X, Patel insisted the FBI took the investigation into Crooks seriously.
But as is often the case with conspiracists, a direct attack on a load-bearing belief is not necessarily going to convince proponents that the belief is wrong. On Benny Johnson’s show, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) argued that Crooks was likely “groomed” as part of some CIA mind-control experiment.
On Friday, meanwhile, Carlson unveiled what he purported were copies of some of Crooks’s online profiles. The Carlson segment was soon echoed in follow-up reports by the New York Post and InfoWars personality Breanna Morello.
The reporting appears to be mostly nonsense. The Post, for example, makes much of Crooks having an account on the art social-network site DeviantArt to suggest he might have a “furry fetish,” in an attempt to link the assassination attempt to a broader belief in MAGA that crazed furries—people who dress up as animals—are out to kill Trump supporters. But even the Post concludes Crooks isn’t connected to any actual furry art. DeviantArt hosts all kinds of bad art, not just furries!
Complicating matters further, Megyn Kelly claimed Monday that the furry stuff was actually an FBI-planted distraction meant to obscure Carlson’s suggestions that the shooter was recruited by shadowy forces.
Both Morello and the Post focused on Crooks’s alleged use of a PayPal account named “Rod Swanson,” noting that that’s also the name of a former FBI agent involved in the investigation of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. The more obvious explanation—that Crooks just misspelled, possibly as a vulgar joke, the name of Parks and Recreation character Ron Swanson—went unmentioned.
As of the publication of this newsletter, the FBI’s rapid response X account had not engaged these stories. Its latest posts were, instead, two reposts of Deputy Director Dan Bongino—one about the bureau’s operations in Chicago, the other rebutting a story that Bongino was not given a background check before being hired.
That the FBI is getting much of the incoming from conspiracy theorists upset with the direction Trump has taken is no surprise. Many of the conspiracies that contributed to Trump’s rise to power involved accusations that the justice system had been weaponized against him and promises that justice for these offenses would not be delayed much longer. With Hillary Clinton still walking freely and Barack Obama still making Netflix movies, there is some natural disappointment. And so, they’ve tried to make justice happen themselves.
AMONG THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES flying around of late is the one that the conservative site the Blaze claimed to break wide open last week with its story suggesting that a former Capitol Police officer had likely planted the pipe bombs at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the Republicans’ Capitol Hill Club on January 6th. The question of the pipe bomb–dropper’s identity has been a huge issue on the right in large part because of Bongino, who said before joining the administration that the bombing was an “inside job” covered up by the FBI.
But the Blaze’s piece, as I wrote last week, was as flimsy as they come. The situation has only gotten worse since then, and in ways that suggest the site will soon be staring down a massive lawsuit. The Blaze has quietly edited the article to make it less aggressive. The former Capitol Police officer has hired a lawyer who told the Washington Post the story was “recklessly false, absurd, and defamatory.”
Rather than keep their heads down, however, Bongino and the FBI scrambled to investigate the accusation anyway. Bongino wrote on X that “RECENT open source leads”—an apparent reference to the Blaze story—had inspired “a week of near 24-hour work.”
Alas, Bongino conceded, some reporting on the bomber’s identity had turned out to be “grossly inaccurate.”
As of this writing, Steve Baker, the lead author of the exposé, remains with the Blaze.
Note that the files released by the committee are not the same as the DOJ files on Epstein that are the subject of the bill before Congress.
We are living in an era of surreal stupidity, which is why we may survive.
Will, I am always in awe of your ability to make order out of this chaos, at least insofar as it can be ordered. I guess what I’m saying is when I read your column I actually think I understand what’s going on! Thank you, I think!