After years spent spreading spidery conspiracy theories for his own political gain, President Trump has found himself wrapped up in the stickiest one of them of all.
For more than a week, the political movement he created has been convulsing with righteous fury over things he and his attorney general have been saying and doing — or rather, not doing — as it relates to the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Trump keeps commanding his supporters to move on from their fixations over the disgraced financier and registered sex offender. But many of his supporters simply cannot swallow the anticlimactic conclusion that the Department of Justice put forth a week ago when it basically said there was nothing to see here, folks.
By the week’s end, a rabble of conspiracists who’ve been hand-fed for years by Mr. Trump broke into open revolt against him.
The fallout is testing the power the president holds over his most loyal followers, the ones who have trusted him all along and who believed they would learn a whole lot more about the Epstein saga if they returned Mr. Trump to office.
It is entirely too soon to know what the revolt will mean or if and when it might sputter out, but the nature of it was stunning to behold. It was like a Möbius strip of paranoia and distrust: A political movement that galvanized and exploded around a conspiracy theory — lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace were central to Mr. Trump’s political rise — cannibalizing itself over the mother of all modern conspiracy theories.
And in a twist, Mr. Trump’s usual playbook for getting himself out of trouble seemed not to be working this time — in fact, it was only making his predicament worse. In his social media post on Saturday, he tried to cast the blame for any unresolved Epstein mysteries on Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But the base wasn’t buying it.
“People are really upset at the outright dismissal of it,” said Natalie Winters, the “War Room” correspondent and 24-year-old protégé of Stephen K Bannon. “I have a good pulse on these people,” she said of Mr. Trump’s base. “I have never seen such sustained wavering.”
Asked about the backlash Monday, a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, did not comment on specifics but said that Mr. Trump was focused on “protecting civil rights, safeguarding communities, holding criminals accountable and defending victims.”
Still, there is a feeling among some longtime supporters of Mr. Trump’s that their shared journey has reached the terra incognita. “Trump’s persuasive power over his base, especially during his first term, was almost magical,” Mike Cernovich, the prolific pro-Trump social media commentator, wrote in a post on X on Sunday. “The reaction on Epstein should thus be startling to him. No one is buying it. No one is dropping it.”
Inside the White House, there is a kind of battle-hardened sang-froid among staff members, who see this outrage as just another controversy that will blow itself out like all the others.
One person close to Mr. Trump conceded that even by Sunday the president had yet to fully grasp how deep and wide the discontent was because he doesn’t spend much time on the internet where Epstein conspiracy-mongering plays out. Despite his social media presence, Mr. Trump is a 79-year-old man whose media diet consists primarily of cable news and print newspapers.
But by Monday, news networks like CNN were devoting much more airtime to the uproar.
“This isn’t going away,” Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who served as national security adviser for a mere 24 days during the first Trump term, wrote on X. It was only a few years ago that Mr. Flynn (who has blamed a deep state conspiracy for his own ouster from government) stood in the Oval Office and told Mr. Trump that he could not trust the data in the voting machines used in the 2020 election. Now, he was demanding that the Trump administration “address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein.”
Roseanne Barr, who was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal supporters, popped off on X. “Mr. President,” she wrote, “yes, we still care about Epstein. Is there a time not to care about child sex trafficking? Read the damn room.”
This is not the first time his base has been upset with him. There was much disillusionment after he encouraged Americans to take Covid vaccines and there has been outcry over his hawkish foreign policy moves, such as when he ordered the U.S. strike that killed the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani, or, more recently, dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities.
But the conjecture around Mr. Epstein’s crimes and death is a many-layered mania that can’t really be compared to anything else. The shadowy concepts that undergird the whole thing go to the “very foundation of MAGA,” as Ms. Winters put it, because, in her view and the view of people like her, “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.”
She summed up the movement’s sense of betrayal this way: “I just think it’s frankly very grifty to have spent your entire career promoting, even if it weren’t the Epstein thing directly, but the idea that there is this deep state, the idea that there’s this unelected class of, you know, bankers, corporation, countries, intel agencies, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar — and I don’t believe that — or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.”
This twisted tale has raised fundamental questions about the limits of Mr. Trump’s abilities to control the conspiratorial forces he has plied in his pursuit of the presidency.
He sprang to power at a time of deep mistrust in this country following two wars and a financial crisis, selling himself as the only one who could be trusted to tell the truth about a corrupt uniparty cabal that sold out the country. One phrase he repeated constantly during that first run for president was “believe me.” He said it about all sorts of situations and subjects. Believe me. Believe me. Believe me. He was the one who would expose the hidden hand squeezing them all.
After the attempts on his life last year, he promoted the idea that he was such a threat to the establishment that it wanted him dead. His return to the site of an assassination attempt during the campaign took on overtones of a mass religious event. The crowd broke out into a sustained chant of “where we go one, we go all.” That is the cry of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that Mr. Trump will someday be the one to expose a ring of pedophiles who control the government. Many of his supporters that day said they genuinely believed Mr. Trump had been saved by God to fulfill this prophecy.
But now that he is the one in control of the government, he is telling his supporters to move on from all of that. It has left many of them mystified.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Ms. Winters said when asked why she thought Mr. Trump posted what he did on Saturday. “It’s bizarre. I just don’t know.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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