The controversy over the mysterious “Epstein Files,” which President Donald Trump’s administration first pledged to release and then decided not to, has Democrats back in touch with one of America’s great political traditions: anti-establishment conspiracy theories. Not only is this good for the party, it is also — dare I say it — healthy for U.S. politics.
Theories of this type differ from the more extreme Russiagate allegations against Trump (or Trump’s infamous charges that former President Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya) in that they are not narrowly partisan. As such, they are especially appealing to the kinds of people who are disengaged from politics and alienated from mainstream institutions. In other words, just the kinds of people who’ve flocked to Trump’s banner over the past decade.
These sorts of views used to be distributed much more evenly across the political system, or even primarily on the left. When I was a kid, the kinds of people who believed the government was covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life also tended to believe that the government played a role in the spread of crack cocaine.
A classic pop-culture work of conspiratorialism such as Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK” did not exactly endorse the Democratic Party’s criticisms of President George H.W. Bush. But the general thrust of the film — that oil interests, Cuban exiles and Cold War superhawks conspired to murder the president in order to escalate military involvement in Vietnam — was certainly left-wing. After all, when the movie came out, conservatives had held the presidency nearly continuously for two decades. Why shouldn’t people on the outs with the system gravitate toward the left?
Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political scientist who studies conspiracy theories and politics, emphasizes that conspiratorial thinking is typical of the politics of outsiders. It’s normally seen on the losing side. Shortly after “JFK’s” release, Bill Clinton was elected president. So the leading conspiracies of the 1990s often attracted a right-wing gloss because a Democrat was in the White House. Then came George W. Bush’s term, full of dark whispers regarding the real truth about 9/11 and Michael Moore’s popular documentary suggesting the whole thing was part of some scheme to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
What’s unusual about Trump is that he leveraged conspiratorial thinking in a very explicit way for a politician. He overcame the Republican establishment with outsider support in 2016 — and then managed to retain his outsider status even while he was president.
By 2024, it felt natural for anyone alienated from mainstream American life for almost any reason to support Trump. His coalition included not just those who agreed with him on tariffs or immigration, but also those who suspected that the government was suppressing information about the health impact of seed oils, the origins of COVID-19 or, yes, the case against the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The conspiracists turning on Trump now are part of a more natural process of restoring balance to the political system. He is, for better or worse, the president. He has neutered the Republican establishment, humbled the Democratic Party and installed his loyalists throughout the government. He is the government. And if you’re not happy with how things are going, that’s on him.
What’s particularly problematic for Trump about the Epstein case is that, having both encouraged this conspiracy and accepted responsibility for governing the country, he’s now getting squeezed by various competing factions — and conspiracy theories.
In one sense, the Epstein story is about a finance guy who used his wealth to commit serious sexual crimes and died in prison in 2019. In another sense, it is about how he used his wealth to cultivate an influential circle of people. People want to know whether his famous friends were also involved in the crimes, and whether his business was a front for providing access to the girls he abused.
Once Trump took office again, however, and decided not to release the complete Epstein files, sustaining a belief in this conspiracy required subscribing to another one — involving the attorney general, the director of the FBI, the vice president and others at the highest reaches of the U.S. government: The champions of the original conspiracy theory were now in on it. This possibility threatens to fracture Trump’s coalition.
Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, seem to be having fun for the first time in nearly a decade. They are coming together around an issue that they know resonates with people outside their base and which transcends the never-ending factional conflicts set off by the 2016 primary.
Which is not to say that Epstein conspiracy theories will deliver the midterms for Democrats. But it is worth thinking about how they can build on the Epstein story, which continues to dominate the news cycle. Uscinski and eight co-authors published a 2021 paper suggesting a two-axis organization of American politics. Rather than the conventional political compass, with economic issues on one axis and cultural issues on another, they put essentially all ideological conflict on one axis and an establishment/anti-establishment on the other.
They show that both parties used to have large anti-establishment wings, with Bernie Sanders gaining a lot of support in 2016 not only from left-wing Democrats but also from a bigger tent of anti-establishment Democrats. Across the next several cycles, those less ideological Sanders voters became Trump supporters. The Epstein controversy has fractured Trump’s movement in a more profound way than any number of seemingly more substantive issues precisely because some of his supporters are basically anti-establishmentarians with vague or disorganized policy views.
Democrats, especially Democrats who aren’t socialists, need to relearn the habit of standing up for the little guy versus the establishment in ways that go beyond the distributional tables of a tax bill. A core reason that Epstein conspiracy theories are so widespread is that the public is broadly cynical about the way rich people are treated by the state and the legal system.
These themes complement standard Democratic Party policy goals, but many voters understand them in terms of personalities. When Barack Obama first ran for president, he was the fresh-faced outsider who was going to bring new people into government and fix the mess in Washington. He was in office for eight years. But who have been the party’s nominees since? A former first lady and secretary of state followed by two vice presidents in a row. It’s not hard to see the party as a closed circle of establishmentarians.
The kind of change many people want is not necessarily dramatic policy change, but change in personnel — the elevation of outsiders uncorrupted by ties to the system, either the party’s or the government’s. To maximize the opportunity provided by Trump’s various stumbles, whether on policy or personal corruption or Epstein, Democrats need to do more than pound the table. They need to find people who can constructively channel the kind of anti-establishment outrage that made Trump president, and is now testing his presidency.
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