Donald Trump, who has regularly indulged in conspiracy theories alongside his supporters during his rise to power, complained on Sunday that it’s Democrats that are too focused on conspiracy theories.
Trump, whose administration is under scrutiny over its handling of Jeffrey Epstein investigations, claimed that “all they know how to do is talk and think about conspiracy theories and nonsense.”
“If they’d waste their time talking about America being great again, it would be so much nicer,” the president said during a meeting in Scotland on Sunday with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Trump himself has long employed conspiracies as a candidate and then president, from becoming one of the leading proponents of the Obama birther conspiracy to playing into his supporters’ fixation with the QAnon movement.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump continued this trend, latching onto a baseless and racist conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating neighborhood pets.
Now, after years of courting conspiracy theories about his opponents, the spotlight has turned on Trump over Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting a federal trial on sex trafficking charges
The administration’s handling of materials related to Epstein investigations — disclosing an initial tranche of information that was mostly already public earlier this year, then suggesting it would not provide further releases, even as recent reporting further highlighted Trump’s longstanding relationship with the late financier — has driven a rare wedge between Trump and his base.
The Epstein scandal has also provided ammunition to Democrats to scrutinize the president.
Pressure reached such a fever pitch that House Speaker Mike Johnson sent Congress off to its summer recess early, temporarily averting a bipartisan push to release more Epstein files.
Despite Trump’s protests, the issue doesn’t look set to settle anytime soon, after Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors, was subpoenaed to testify in Congress and gave an interview to the Department of Justice.
Amid continued furor over the Epstein case, the Trump administration has asked a judge to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the alleged trafficker while opposing Maxwell’s bid at the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.
The Epstein saga appears set to continue, as does Trump and his allies’ insistence that conspiracies are at work to thwart the MAGA movement.
The president has taken to describing the 2016 investigations into whether Russia collaborated with this presidential campaign as a “coup” orchestrated by Barack Obama, while Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called for the former president to face criminal charges for the “treasonous conspiracy.”
Obama’s office has called the claims a “ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
