Can Trump Escape the Epstein Files?
Conspiracy theories have become an essential part of being a conservative.
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We are now into the second month of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, wherein the administration’s downplaying of the Epstein files has angered many in Donald Trump’s MAGA base. This is the first time that we have seen that base break with Trump, even as he seeks to get them to move on to other matters like the crimes of Barack Obama. My anti-Trump friends fall into two categories. One group is obsessed with the Epstein case because they think that it is a path to bringing Trump down. But another group simply isn’t paying attention, because they think that the Epstein scandal is distasteful and not something that educated people should care about. They should be paying attention to more serious issues like the Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid or what’s happening in Gaza.
My position is somewhere in between. The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein shows us how conservatism has morphed since Trump came into office. Conservatism has long been associated with political paranoia ever since it was noted in Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 Harper’s article, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” But today, conspiracy theories are no longer a fringe obsession of certain wackos on the Right; they have become the essence of what it means to be an American conservative.
This was not always the case. As Seymour Martin Lipset argued in his many writings on American exceptionalism, American conservatives differed from their European counterparts insofar as they were really what a European would label a “liberal.” That is, they were in favor of market economics, cutting back state regulation, and the promotion of individual freedom. Under Ronald Reagan, they were strong internationalists, wanting to promote American values of freedom and individualism around the world.
In this respect, populism differs sharply from conservatism. There are several competing definitions of populism out there, but the most generally apposite one is that populists believe in the existence of an elite conspiracy to organize the world in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of ordinary people like themselves. That is why The Matrix has been so popular on the Right: Neo takes the red pill and suddenly realizes that he has been living in a dream. His job, his city, the people around him have all been created by intelligent machines seeking to subjugate the human race, and in response he joins up with Morpheus and a heroic but marginalized group who continues to live in reality.
Donald Trump was the original conspiracist who legitimated and promoted conspiracy thinking. He rose to political prominence by suggesting that Barack Obama was born in Africa and was therefore ineligible to be U.S. President. Over the years he has endorsed all manner of conspiracy theories, which has facilitated the growth of movements like QAnon.
There was a more respectable version of conspiracist thinking that had its origin in writers like James Burnham and Samuel Francis. The former argued that the growth of the administrative state had handed over political control to a vast managerial class that had come to dominate not just the government but schools and universities, corporations, the media, and other elite institutions. Francis applied these ideas to the America of the 1980s, where Ronald Reagan was part of the conspiracy. These themes have been taken up by contemporary conservative intellectuals like Peter Thiel or Patrick Deneen who see the country enveloped in a suffocating liberal consensus from which there is no escape.
QAnon simply takes this narrative to a new level where “elites”—meaning primarily Democrats and liberals—are kidnapping children, grooming them, and then sacrificing them in Satanic rituals in tunnels under Washington D.C. When asked about QAnon, Donald Trump claimed not to know very much about their views. But he has never openly criticized them or their theories, or disavowed their support.
So the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was cultivating a pedophile ring and abusing underage girls was a scandal that fed directly into the central right-wing narrative of elite control, even if the Epstein story doesn’t include the tunnels under Washington. Jeffrey Epstein was the person who was going to confirm this longstanding belief, and reveal the list of Democrats and liberals who had participated in it. For this new type of American conservative, this was not a peripheral issue that would give them ammunition when fighting to close the border or cut back government. It was a matter central to their identity as conservatives.
I don’t think that the Epstein scandal will bring down Donald Trump. But it will definitely hurt his standing among a key group of MAGA supporters. His personal attorney Todd Blanche, now Deputy Attorney General, went to visit Ghislaine Maxwell and evidently agreed to have her moved to a minimum security prison, something she has long wanted but would never be granted under normal circumstances. It does not take much of a conspiratorial mindset to imagine that he was negotiating a deal for her to exonerate Trump in return for a lighter sentence or even a pardon. Whether Trump will totally escape blame for his participation in this cover-up remains to be seen, since Maxwell may not emerge as a credible witness, and there will be a continuing drip of stories linking Trump to Epstein in the coming weeks.
Taking the red pill today is a confusing experience. We are finding out that Neo is not fighting the machines, but actually working with them to hide reality from us.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Is there a non-suspicious explanation for moving Maxwell to minimum security that's even possible?
The current world order, assembled from the wreckage of WW2, is expired. Those bananas, once green, are now brown. As all living things ripen and rot. It is institutional entropy. World orders are torn down - not gently evolved away by technocrats hired to keep them running. Populism is merely the expression of the people’s discontent for the old thing that no longer works. It is part of the process. The confusion of conspiracy theories is just everyone interpreting the noise into signals that agree with their gnawing gut that things can’t continue like this. Populism, whether Jacobins or Hamilton or John Brown or Huey Long or Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani, harness this discontent and a society’s willingness to follow autocrats who actually GET THINGS DONE.
The technocrats hate these brown banana phases because they thrive in systems and gears and social machinery. They don’t understand, or accept, nature’s process to summon the new from the ashes of the old. Liberal technocracy, the managerial class, demand evolution when revolution is the only process from which the new can arise. Sometimes an old thing must simply perish before humanity rethinks new ways, new tools, new innovations - using the technology of the day vs the constitution written by firelight with a feather and ink well. Were there no American Civil War - there would be no Great Reconstruction. Were Europe not in populist ashes, there would no phoenix rise like Bretton Woods, no UN, no EU, no IMF, no American Empire with forward bases across the globe.
It’s ugly. But it’s the forest fire every creature dreads and stampedes from. But nature regrows the foliage more dynamic than ever from its charred remains. Embrace the fire. It is our time. There is an Unseen Hand guiding this cyclical descent into insanity that serves a far larger purpose. We are but players on this historical stage. We don’t write the play - but we recite our lines and strut the stage full of sound and fury.