President Donald Trump has spent two weeks struggling to dig himself out of the scandal that’s become known as the “Epstein files.” Allegations of a conspiracy involving high-ranking government officials, Democrats, and wealthy financiers to cover up how Jeffrey Epstein died—and to conceal a supposed list of the powerful clients who participated in his sex trafficking and pedophilia—have been a major theme in MAGA circles for years.
When Trump appeared to be blocking the release of the Epstein files, and even denied that there was anything substantive to reveal, significant portions of the MAGA world turned against him. Tensions have escalated to the point where Trump has called his own supporters “stupid” and “foolish.”
The story continues to unfold. For now, it appears Trump might survive the fallout through a series of political maneuvers and by pressuring enough Republicans on Capitol Hill to back him. Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as to start the August recess early, in July, to make sure that Democrats wouldn’t have an opportunity to propose legislation that would require the Department of Justice to release all of its information.
Whatever the outcome, the Epstein files controversy remains one of the most difficult internal political challenges that Trump has faced, and a stark reminder of the strength of right-wing conspiratorial politics within the Republican Party.
While many commentators attribute the rise of conspiracy rhetoric within the GOP to Trump, the political style actually has deep roots in right-wing history.
To understand how deeply embedded this style of politics runs through the veins of right-wing politics, we must start with one of its most insightful chroniclers, the historian Richard Hofstadter.
In November 1964, the same month that Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater faced President Lyndon Johnson at the polls, Hofstadter published a seminal article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In it, he argued that there was particular style of politics had found strong support throughout U.S. history, one that “evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy…”
Defining the paranoid style, Hofstadter explained that in it, “The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.” The “paranoid spokesman” saw “the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”
Negotiation was impossible in this worldview because everything was a battle between good and evil. The enemy, in the paranoid mind, “controls the press” while having unlimited funds. In a revised version of the Harper’s essay published in a book, Hofstadter added that conspiracists claimed the conspirator was “gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.” Just as important, this form of political thinking started with “broad defensible judgments” before spinning into something much broader and less defensible.
After tracing the history of the paranoid style—looking back at “illuminism” in the 1790s, the anti-Masonic movement in the 1830s, and anti-Catholicism throughout American history—Hofstadter turned to the period he was living through: the Cold War. During the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, Hofstadter had seen how conspiratorial thinking had a strong hold on the right. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his supporters—right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society (founded in 1958), and conservative radio talk-show hosts—bolstered their support by stoking fear and anger through allegations of conspiracy. The key to the tactic was to take bits and pieces of information that were proven to be true and then spin all sorts of claims and allegations from those known facts into arguments that have no basis in anything other than the paranoid mind.
In a different piece, Hofstadter argued that the Goldwater campaign had elevated younger practitioners of the paranoid style, such as John Stormer and Phyllis Schlafly, who sold millions of books warning of “secret New York kingmakers” who subverted Republican politics.
Hofstadter was not alone with his assessment. A number of scholars in the 1950s and 1960s wrote about the growing hold that conspiratorial politics had within conservative circles—much closer to mainstream Republican politicians than they themselves were willing to acknowledge. In his edited books on the radical right, first published in 1955 as The New American Right and then a revised version in 1963 called The Radical Right, the sociologist Daniel Bell and his colleagues explored this theme as well. The authors, who included Hofstadter, identified Americans with what they called “status anxiety,” individuals susceptible to concerns that their standing was being taken away from others, as a prime audience for these arguments.
Members of President John F. Kennedy’s administration were also concerned about the radical right, and in 1963, Kennedy instructed his advisor Myer Feldman to study the issue. Feldman found that the radical right was not as marginal as many liberals had assumed. Organizations connected to the extremes spent as much as $25 million a year on spreading their beliefs. Major foundations and businesses funded the movement. Right-wing propaganda was being disseminated among the military. Most important, Feldman found that these forces had ties to mainstream conservative movements and the Republican Party itself. “The radical right-wing constitutes a formidable force in American life today,” Feldman wrote, and it was “more successful, politically, than is generally realized.”
Since then, historians have confirmed that proponents of conspiratorial thinking were a formidable presence among conservatives. For example, in his brilliant biography of William F. Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus sheds new light on the proximity Buckley had to this kind of extremism at the height of his career.
So when Trump tapped into this style upon entering the national scene with the birther movement, he was building his political foundation on a tradition with very deep roots in Republican politics. What made Trump different, though, was that he became president.
Conservatism certainly does not have a monopoly on conspiratorial thinking. At many points in U.S. history since WWII, thinly substantiated arguments about right-wing cabals have surfaced among activists and even some elected officials. In The Age of Reform, Hofstadter highlighted how conspiracies were common among populists in the 1890s who were fighting for small farmers.
But what has been notable in recent decades is how this kind of rhetoric has moved to the very top of Republican politics. Unlike earlier periods, when Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower pushed back against right wing extremist forces, realizing that making them mainstream would hurt the conservative cause, Trump moved in a very different direction. He embraced conspiratorial rhetoric rather than taming it, warning of a “rigged” media that manipulated the news and George Soros-funded liberals who championed the far left. He promised to “drain the swamp” of corrupt actors whom he claimed controlled national politics. Trump has sent signals endorsing QAnon conspiracy theories and welcomed social media figures from these circles. During the height of the COVID pandemic, he amplified unsubstantiated claims about causes, treatments, and casualty numbers without concern about his impact. His comfort with conspiracy became central to his attacks on the 2020 presidential election where he charged, without evidence, that the voting had been “rigged.”. At Mar-a-Lago in 2022, he hosted a proponent of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory about a Democrat-run child-sex-trafficking ring using a pizza joint in Washington as its home base.
With a conservative media environment that creates immense space for these kinds of conversations, Trump has much more to work with than did proponents of the paranoid style in the 1950s and 1960s. With his attacks on the autonomy and funding of higher education, he is attempting to undercut institutions of knowledge that offer one of the best antidotes for younger Americans to this kind of discourse.
As Hofstadter argued with communism, which he agreed posed an international threat and needed to be checked despite criticizing conspiratorial rhetoric about the issue, today there are very serious issues at stake with Epstein, who was convicted for horrendous crimes.
Indeed, understanding the power of conspiracy politics within the Right, is not to say there can’t be truth to the basis of their claims—including the possibility that President Trump is trying to cover up information about his relationship to Epstein.
But the specific ways in which the issue has been discussed within much of the MAGA world have taken the form of the paranoid style. They have insisted on a concerted and coordinated operation across different institutions and pockets of elites (ranging from the Department of Justice to prison guards, all with a clear political agenda), which fits quintessential conspiratorial tropes. They have made assumptions about why information has been held back and insinuated that because a person had contact with Epstein they inevitably participated in his sexual crimes. In this worldview, anyone who questions the conspiracy instantly becomes part of the conspiracy.
Trump, who has thrived by capitalizing on this political tradition at the highest levels of power, has learned that he can’t easily control it. Unless he rides that style to strengthen his standing, even he can fall victim to its influence, becoming the focus of, rather than the warrior against, the conspiracies that many of his followers believe can bring civilization to an end.
It is not a surprise that Trump has responded to his being attacked for a conspiracy by trying to throw public attention back on other conspiracies, including his baseless accusation that President Obama acted in treasonous ways in 2016.
As Democrats jump on this issue, understandably sensing a major political opportunity, they should be careful about doing so in a cautious manner and being judicious about how they handle this temporary alliance with the MAGA coalition. In the world of conspiracy politics, even one of the main proponents can quickly become the accused. Trump might very well survive this round, but he now sees that he can become the victim rather than the hero if he is not careful.
