How a shadowy conspiracy turned MAGA against Trump and Bondi

Washington Post

10-07-2025

'Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland,' songwriter Paul Simon observed, and President Donald Trump's nutters at the Justice Department are feeling the brunt of it.
As civilians, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel (along with Patel's deputy, Dan Bongino) cheerfully stoked conspiracy theories surrounding the death of the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. According to the lurid narrative, Epstein threatened to expose famous guests at his supposed sex parties, who arranged to have him killed in prison to protect their secrets.
Now that they're in office, Trump's appointees have found zero evidence to support these stories. Their announcement to that effect — 'no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals' — has infuriated their former fans: provocateur Laura Loomer of the tinfoil-hat brigade called for Bondi's resignation.
Conspiracist thinking is hardly exclusive to Americans, but we're highly prone to it, and the tools of modern communication spread dark fantasies like pandemic viruses. The floodwaters of Texas had scarcely receded before stories of shadowy forces manipulating rain clouds began to circulate.
No factual fabric is too threadbare to support a robust conspiracy theory. People believed a D.C. pizza parlor had a basement filled with kidnapped children — though it didn't have a basement, period. People believed the government was staging fake school massacres as a pretext to confiscate guns — though guns are freely sold at the nearest Walmart. People believed a pillow salesman possessed data showing that the 2020 election was stolen.
But it doesn't help the credibility of weary debunkers when the government is shown to have lied about inconvenient facts. Turns out there really was a conspiracy of silence inside the Biden White House to cover up the president's age-related decline. And elements of the George W. Bush administration really did ignore doubts about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their stated reason for the 2003 invasion.
As for Area 51 and the government's supposed cache of space alien technology, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that this conspiracy theory is largely of the military's own making. An internal Air Force investigation found that authorities spread rumors and concocted tales of alien activity — sometimes to cover up top-secret experiments, sometimes just to freak out new recruits.
Journal reporters Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha learned what was left out of the investigation's published report concerning 'the foundational myths about UFOs': The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.
'At the same time,' the pair continued, 'the very nature of Pentagon operations — an opaque bureaucracy that kept secret programs embedded within secret programs, cloaked in cover stories — created fertile ground for the myths to spread.'
Meanwhile, the CIA has tacitly confessed to lying for more than 60 years about its involvement in a group of anti-Castro students that had multiple contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As part of a document release ordered by Trump, the agency turned loose the confirmation that 'Howard' — the shadowy figure behind the student group — was in fact George Joannides, a Miami-based agent.
The document vindicated work by the tireless Kennedy murder investigator Jefferson Morley, whom I count as a friend though we disagree fundamentally on this mother of all conspiracy theories. Purely by coincidence, the nugget came to light as I was rereading Don DeLillo's powerful 1988 novel 'Libra,' which oozes paranoia through a fictional portrait of Oswald.
Joannides would have fit nicely into DeLillo's book, which blends real and imagined characters into an atmosphere as stifling as the summer of 1963 in Miami, New Orleans and Dallas, where the story is largely set. The novelist's art — and DeLillo is an artist of the first order — is the creation of non-realities that seem entirely real. In this case, the art doubles on itself, because 'Libra' is fiction about a fiction.
In one brilliant passage, the author paints an imaginary picture of a real person, former FBI agent Guy Banister, engaged in an imaginary reverie over a conspiracy theory inside the larger conspiracy theory. Dizzy yet? Chinese troops were supposedly massing in secret in Mexico's Baja peninsula for an invasion of California.
'He wanted to believe it was true,' DeLillo writes. 'He did believe it was true. But he also knew it wasn't. … The thing that mattered was the rapture of the fear of believing. It confirmed everything. It justified everything.'
Trump's conspiracy mongers at Justice are in trouble with their former supporters because they have dared to disrupt the rapture of the fear of believing. The Epstein conspiracists — like all who prefer a tangled and menacing web to the bland truth — want to believe and do believe, even when they know, deep down, it's just a story. They like stories, the scarier the better.