By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
The following exchange ended up in my Twitter feed on
Tuesday morning. “Genuinely, what happened to QAnon?” one user asked.
“They won,” another answered.
Funny, true—and intriguing. Why would a mass movement
like QAnon lose momentum after its hero won the presidency? Normally,
political movements gain strength upon attaining power, no?
On Sunday, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino sat down with Fox
Business’ Maria Bartiromo for an interview. That would have been unremarkable a
year ago; just three MAGA infotainment blowhards shootin’ the breeze about
whatever the latest elite conspiracy to destroy America happened to be. Because
the country chose to lean hard into dystopia last November, though, Patel and
Bongino are now Nos. 1 and 2 at the FBI.
Bartiromo brought up Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile
financier who committed suicide in 2019 while in federal custody in New York.
There may be no conspiracy theory in modern America more mainstream than the
belief that Epstein was actually murdered by powerful figures to silence him
before he could expose their own sexual abuse of children. Right-wing populists
are particularly predisposed
to believe it.
It was a suicide, Patel told Bartiromo:
“You know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.” Bongino backed
up his boss. “He killed himself,” he said of Epstein. “I’ve seen the whole
file. He killed himself.”
The two were also asked about the still-unsolved case of
the pipe bombs that were planted outside Republican and Democratic headquarters
in Washington hours before the insurrection in 2021. Bongino speculated
on his podcast earlier this year that the bomb plot was a “fake assassination
attempt” aimed at discouraging Republicans from challenging the results of the
election in Congress that day. “I believe the FBI knows the identity of this
pipe bomber on January 6,” he added, a suspicion many populists share.
Given the chance on Sunday to expose the alleged cover-up
now that he’s privy to the agency’s secrets, he pleaded with viewers for
patience instead. “Just wait and you’ll see,” he said, vaguely
and not very convincingly. “Nothing we’re doing—nothing—is by accident.”
What about the FBI’s role in supposedly instigating the
riot at the Capitol, another conspiracy theory Trumpers embraced in order to
shift blame away from their man? The point of putting MAGA supplicants like
Patel and Bongino in charge is that, unlike the “deep state,” they’re
absolutely willing to tell the disgraceful truth about how many undercover
agents were in the crowd egging everyone on—assuming any were. Here at last was
their opportunity.
Bongino hedged again. Information is coming, he promised,
but cautioned the faithful that “there’s a difference between agents and
assets. And I just hope when people put that information out there, they make
the distinction.” Which sure sounds like he’s preparing to validate last year’s
findings by the
inspector general that there were no FBI employees in the crowd at the
Capitol, only informants.
Some on the right aren’t taking this sudden turn toward
sobriety well. If QAnon “won,” what exactly did it win?
Power to the people.
Most prominent MAGA influencers looked the other way at
the Bartiromo interview, presumably not wanting to criticize figures like Patel
and Bongino, who have their own large bases of fervent support on the right.
Remember, the first rule of populist media is to never get on the wrong side of
your audience.
But online
randos and lesser
influencers had less to lose by attacking them for failing to expose “the
truth.” And some big names who are famously invested in conspiracy theories
decided it was more important to stay on brand than to avoid offending the
Patel and Bongino fans among their listeners.
Alex Jones, for example, scoffed
at Bongino’s claim that the FBI’s Epstein files can be trusted. “The files
you were given? Give me a break,” he said. “There’s three things [that] don’t
hang themselves: Christmas tree lights, drywall, and Jeffrey Epstein, as
Senator Kennedy rightfully said.” Glenn Beck went
darker, grumbling about “the constant lies from both sides of the
administration, both Republican and Democrat,” and warning that “Robespierre”
is what you get when people can’t even trust a government that its own side
controls.
The paranoid right suddenly finds itself out of excuses
for failing to expose the total civic and moral depravity of its enemies, a
belief in which their faith is absolute. They have all the access they could
ever want to government secrets and precisely the sort of slavish Trump
sycophants whom they trust in key positions, starting with Patel and Bongino.
The truth, as they understand it, is out there, and the evidence that
substantiates it is at last within their grasp.
So where is it? What happens if the Trump administration
can’t produce it?
The paradox of populism is that it’s both authoritarian
and anti-authoritarian, and in each respect extreme. It’s utterly credulous
about claims made by trusted authorities and utterly incredulous, to the point
of being unpersuadable, about claims made by distrusted ones. Government is an
authority that it doesn’t trust, by definition: Populism is a grassroots
backlash to elites capturing the power of the state and exploiting it to their
own advantage.
Which, inevitably, makes it lousy with theories about
government conspiracies. The challenge for the right in 2025 is figuring out
how to process those theories when the government happens to be led by someone
whom it trusts absolutely. If Donald Trump’s administration insists that
Epstein killed himself, what’s the proper populist response? Authoritarian
submission or anti-authoritarian skepticism?
Patel and Bongino versus Jones and Beck is that dilemma
in microcosm.
Another way to look at the situation is in terms of power
and powerlessness. Conspiracy theories, it’s been said, help people cope with
the world when reality is frightening and they’re helpless to change it. It’s
comforting for some to believe that George W. Bush blew up the World Trade
Center because Bush and his party could be made to answer to Americans, but
al-Qaeda could not. You can stop the government at the polls, but there’s
nothing you can do to stop a jihadi at the controls of a jumbo jet that’s
approaching your office tower.
So if QAnon seems like a diminished force during the
Trump restoration, the reason may be as simple as them having shed that sense
of powerlessness last November. Winning the election means that reality isn’t
as frightening as it used to be. Trump and his toadies have supplanted the
elite and taken control of, well, everything. What use do Q-bots have now for
theories that explain how those elites are conspiring against the people?
And if QAnoners no longer need them, the broader right
might also soon plausibly find itself less interested in all sorts of
conspiracies that it used to promote—Epstein’s murder, the “fedsurrection,” you
name it. Why, if we’re lucky, Alex Jones will end up rebooting his show as a
sober Snopes-like program devoted to debunking the nuttiest allegations about
America’s very impressive federal government.
But we probably won’t be that lucky, huh?
The new conspiracies.
Here’s where I gently remind you that Donald Trump has
been president before, and conspiracy theorists seemed to do just fine during
his tenure.
It was during his last term, not Joe Biden’s, that QAnon
first came to public attention. The then-president even gave them a shoutout
occasionally during public appearances. If conspiracy theories are a
function of feeling powerless, it’s odd that the most notorious conspiracy
theory of the past decade would have gained traction under an administration
led by someone whom populists trusted absolutely, no?
Actually … no, not really.
QAnon was a way to explain Trump’s failures. America’s
government and political leadership were infested by a secret cabal of
sex-trafficking child molesters, adherents insisted; Trump, the heroic populist
outsider, would expose the cabal and mete out righteous vengeance to the many
perverts behind it. That narrative was a souped-up version of his “drain the
swamp” pitch from the 2016 campaign trail. Instead of ridding Washington of
special interests, he was going to rid it of degenerate Satanists preying on
kids.
Except he didn’t. There were no arrests of powerful
“elites” apart from the president’s
buddy, Jeffrey Epstein. The Satanic swamp was not drained.
Like any good religion, QAnon offered answers to those
who couldn’t understand why divine justice hadn’t prevailed. Justice is
coming, it insisted, finding cryptic revelations in mundane Trump tweets
and other political detritus about a master plan that was working precisely as
intended. The former president’s “failures” were actually nothing of the sort,
merely deliberate feints in his grand scheme to purge the cabal. He, and they,
weren’t powerless to stop the enemy after all. Everything was proceeding
exactly as it was supposed to.
It’s safe to assume that that pattern will recur. There
will be many new failures in Trump’s second term, and accordingly, many
new conspiracy theories offered to explain them. We’ve already seen a couple,
in fact, albeit far tamer than QAnon.
His use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged
gangsters from Venezuela without due process, for example, is, quite literally,
based on a conspiracy theory. To lawfully invoke the Act, the president needs
to show that members of the gang Tren de Aragua (TDA) “invaded” the United
States “at the direction” of the Venezuelan government. But an assessment
conducted by U.S. intelligence officials last month found that the Maduro
regime is most likely not
directing the activities of TDA.
That verdict ended up getting two top officials on the
National Intelligence Committee fired.
They challenged a conspiracy theory that was useful to Trump, so now they’re
gone.
He and his supporters have also begun steering around to
a conspiracy theory more common to progressives to explain the economic damage
caused by tariffs. When Walmart announced last week that it would soon raise
prices to offset the burden of the new tax, the president threw a tantrum on
Truth Social. “Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than
expected,” he fumed.
“Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not
charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your
customers!!!”
Never mind the fact that asking Walmart to “eat the
tariffs” directly contradicts his years of nonsense about tariffs being paid by
the countries on which they’re levied, not by Americans. What he’s alleging
here is “greedflation,”
the idea that higher prices on goods are due not to market forces or, God
forbid, terrible policy, but rather corporate greed. Supposedly, Walmart could
comfortably absorb the cost of the tariffs and spare Americans from a financial
burden, but some combination of raw avarice and wanting to make Trump look bad
has led them to pass the cost along.
As prices begin to rise across numerous industries and
Trump’s polls turn sour, “greedflation” will become MAGA’s go-to dogma to shift
blame. It’s not that tariffs are dumb, it’s that corporate America is colluding
in seizing an opportunity to gouge consumers and to weaken public support for
protectionism. It’s a conspiracy.
And then there are vaccines. In March, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. welcomed
a new “researcher” to the Department of Health and Human Services to study
whether vaccines cause autism. That question has been studied many times, and
the answer is always the same—no—but Kennedy’s guy is
a true believer who will surely deliver the contrarian finding that his
boss desires. Even more so than is true already, it will soon be an article of
faith on the right that autism is a side effect of immunization and that
pharmaceutical companies surely must have known and cooperated in hiding the
truth.
That conspiracy theory will helpfully obscure one of
Trump’s greatest “failures,” accelerating the development of COVID vaccines
during the pandemic. Operation Warp Speed was the best thing he’s done in
public service, but he leads a movement of paranoiacs who believe the virus was
some sort of hoax, and so he must atone. Letting Kennedy destroy Republicans’
faith in vaccination by pushing disinformation is his atonement.
Fads.
In short, it’s not that there will be fewer right-wing
conspiracy theories under the new administration. It’s that the targets will
need to come mostly from outside the government.
It’ll be too awkward for populists to go on babbling
about “deep state” saboteurs when, unlike in his first term, everyone in a
position of authority across the federal bureaucracy is a Trump shoeshiner.
(Especially now that the executive branch has been pruned by DOGE.) He’s now in
his fifth year as president; to keep complaining that his government is still
being subverted from within is at some point to accuse Trump himself of being
an incompetent rube who can’t sniff out traitors when they’re right in front of
him—even in his second, “do-over” try as chief executive.
As an editor said to me this morning, the nature of MAGA
conspiracy theories will likely shift from “what is our terrible government
hiding from the people?” to “what are our terrible people hiding from the
government?” Greedy corporations, sinister pharmaceutical companies, violent
Venezuelan gang members: They’re the villains in the new Trump conspiracies,
and they’re all conveniently non-governmental elements.
And populists will be fine with it. My guess is that they
ultimately don’t care very much which conspiracies they need to use to scratch
their itch of hating elite, so long as they get to scratch it somehow.
Conspiracy theories are faddish. A few are deathless,
like the Kennedy assassination—another bust for Team Trump,
by the way—but most come and go according to political trends. You don’t hear
much anymore about “9/11 truth” (except, er, from certain
senators) because there’s nothing to be gained for either side by
mentioning it. The war on terror is over. Bushism has been rejected by both
parties.
Epstein and the “fedsurrection” might soon fade, too.
Once the right gets a juicy bone like “vaccines cause autism” to chew on, they
can leave those less meaty ones behind.
I doubt infotainers like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck will
struggle much to pivot from government conspiracies to anti-government
conspiracies, especially as Trumpism continues its transformation
into progressivism. Left-wingers have spent decades successfully demagoging
corporate America and the pharmaceutical industry; as long as populist
audiences have some malign, powerful influence to blame for America’s problems,
what does it matter if it’s the “deep state” or Moderna?
A few days ago, the president posted a video on Truth
Social that casually accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of having murdered
numerous people, including John F. Kennedy Jr. That’s the laziest, most
predictable conspiratorial smear to which a Republican can resort, fully 30
years out of date, but the fact that Trump stooped to it felt like a
meta-commentary on how conspiracy theories function in his politics. They don’t
have to be true, believable, or even relevant to be worthy. The target almost
doesn’t matter. The point is simply to signal one’s tribal affiliation by
impugning a common enemy.
That practice will go on among the grassroots right, even
with Trump and his people in charge of the government. Populists will continue
to position themselves opposite “elites” and to impugn them by imagining new
plots in which they’re involved—but the definition of “elite” is so cynically
adaptable to political circumstance that, to millions of Americans, neither the
president of the United States nor the richest man in history qualify. They’re
not giving up on conspiracy theories under Trump 2.0, they’re giving up (or
soon will) on the idea that government is the locus of “elite” corruption.
QAnon won, but even winners sometimes need to make adjustments.
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