As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump loved a conspiracy theory.
He started his political career by stoking the lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. By 2024, he complained, falsely, that noncitizens would vote in the November election and throw the result to Democrats. He declared on a debate stage that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He promised to release government files on Sept. 11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and told Fox News that “I guess I would” release the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, too.
As president, though, he’s finding that it’s a whole lot easier to start a conspiracy theory than it is to put one to rest.
That is the challenge facing Trump now, as his political supporters stage an open revolt over his administration’s decision not to release further materials about Epstein, the convicted sex offender who hobnobbed with the global elite before he died by suicide in prison in 2019.
Putting the genie back in the bottle
They could be forgiven for expecting more details. Trump installed two vocal Epstein conspiracy theorists and right-wing media personalities, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, to run the F.B.I. after both men spent years telling their audiences there really was a there there. This spring, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised big revelations about the case that have come to nothing.
It turns out, though, it is a whole lot easier to be a conspiracy theorist when you’re not president, you don’t control both houses of Congress, and you haven’t handpicked the leaders of the nation’s premier investigative agencies.
Trump has tried to put the genie back in the bottle. He admonished a reporter for asking about the matter at a cabinet meeting last week — “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” — and then, over the weekend, told off his followers, in a lengthy social media post.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” Trump asked, urging them to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
On his podcast, however, Stephen Bannon, the influential former Trump adviser, suggested that the furor wasn’t going anywhere — and that it posed a real political risk for Trump.
“You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement,” he said, warning that this could cost Republicans dozens of House seats in the midterm elections next year.
The problem with a conspiracy theory is, of course, the more you talk about it, the more interest people take in it. The whole thing is born of distrust — so who wants to listen to someone telling them there’s nothing to see, even if that someone is Trump himself?
This is not usually a problem for Trump and his allies. The president has reaped political gains from many a conspiracy theory without having to offer up proof for any of them. And rarely has he needed to squelch one he or his allies stoked.
Years of theories
Trump has spent years railing about what he describes, without evidence, as systemic fraud in the 2020 election — a fiction that gave his supporters a grievance to rally around and insulated him from having to reckon with his electoral vulnerabilities or admit defeat.
His claims about noncitizens voting have shaped executive orders and legislation in Congress though he never came up with proof that it happens on a significant scale. And he echoed unproven claims about Social Security fraud as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency riffled through the department’s data this year.
At times, members of the Trump administration have labored to show that they were trying. In late May, Bongino said on X that the F.B.I. was redoubling its investigations into several enduring Washington mysteries, including the pipe bombs found in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the cocaine found at the White House in 2023 and the enduring question of who leaked the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case, which ultimately overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
“I try to read as much of your feedback as possible but the workday is busy, and my office is a SCIF with limited phone access,” Bongino said, using the official acronym for the secure area — or “sensitive compartmented information facility” — where he works.
Still, the Epstein matter is a rare instance in which the Trump administration has actually been expected to offer proof of a conspiracy theory that moves the president’s followers.
That might be why, in his social media post on Saturday, Trump sought to divert their attention back to a conspiracy theory he’s never had to prove.
“The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024,” Trump wrote, promising that Bondi, his attorney general, was “looking into” that — “and much more.”
He Said That
Pleasant talk by day, ‘missiles’ at night
President Trump is known for changing his mind. My colleague Minho Kim has been following his about-face on President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and was listening closely when the president brought up the Russian leader in the Oval Office today.
In 2016, when asked about his frequent changes of opinion, Trump emphasized the advantages of “flexibility.” Still, his recent 180-degree turnabout on President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Ukraine is remarkable.
On Monday, Trump vented frustration at Putin during a meeting with Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general.
“My conversations with him are always very pleasant,” Trump said. “And then the missiles go off that night.”
Trump’s threat to impose “very severe” tariffs on Russia if it does not agree to a cease-fire deal in the next 50 days is the latest vibe shift in a relationship that was quite warm until recently. Trump once called Putin a “genius.” He berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on live television. He sent envoys to Saudi Arabia to negotiate a peace deal with Putin surrogates.
But Putin’s never-ending strikes on Ukrainian cities have tested Trump’s patience, which finally ran out last week when he called the Russian leader’s diplomatic gestures “meaningless.”
But Trump left himself room to relent. On Monday, he sounded fairly sympathetic to Russia and its leader, hoping that Putin would soon make a deal and “save his country.”
In One Graphic
The many hats of the Trump administration
Running a government agency, department or institution is a big job. Some Trump administration officials are doing that and more.
My colleagues Tim Balk and Ashley Cai identified presidential appointees who are doing double duty. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary and former resident playboy on “The Real World” on MTV, is the latest to gain an additional job as interim administrator of NASA. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, has two more current roles on his résumé as the director of watchdog agencies.
Marco Rubio, with four jobs, sits at the top of the list, and is rivaled by few in history.
Minho Kim and Jacob Reber contributed reporting.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to how President Trump is changing Washington, the country and its politics.
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