The Vance Conspiracy

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 21, 2025

 

Conspiracy theories usually aren’t rational, but hostility to conspiracy theories isn’t always rational either. For instance, despite the evidence trickling in that Donald Trump was dirtier than suspected during his bromance with Jeffrey Epstein, I remain skeptical that he’s as guilty as he looks. But really, I’m choosing to remain skeptical because I don’t want to think of myself as a conspiracy theorist.

 

Anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, 9/11 truthers, grassy-knoll-ers: Conspiracy theorists are often led into contemptible idiocy by the temptation of motivated reasoning. To believe, say, that the moon landing was faked, you really need to want to believe it. And the more badly you want it, the easier it becomes to rationalize preposterous scenarios involving dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people successfully conspiring to pull off an elaborate plot without a single leak among them.

 

Ironically, the fact that I find Trump contemptible is why I continue to resist the possibility that he was complicit in Epstein’s crimes. I’m overcorrecting for the risk of motivated reasoning because it really is that tempting.

 

That’s why I sympathize to some degree with the Resistance libs who’ve spent the last few days on social media kicking around a conspiracy theory involving J.D. Vance, Rupert Murdoch, and a plot to use the Epstein scandal to oust Trump. It’s a delicious thought, just deserts for a leader who once tried to oust a duly elected president undemocratically and who’s exploited right-wing paranoia about pedophiles for his own ends. If you’re a MAGA skeptic—left, right, or center—you badly want it to be true.

 

But it isn’t true. It’s stupid.

 

According to the conspiracy theory, Vance visited Murdoch recently at his ranch in Montana to scheme with Fox News executives about bringing the president down by tying him to Epstein’s crimes. Vance booster Peter Thiel and other tech bros are supposedly in on it, too. They all have the same transactional relationship with Trump, after all, glomming onto him as a populist vehicle whom they hoped to ride to power but having no real use for him otherwise.

 

Now that their mission has been accomplished, it’s time to send the president packing by hyping the Trump-Epstein relationship until he leaves office and is succeeded by J.D., a smarter and somewhat less emotionally damaged nationalist.

 

The smoking gun in all this, supposedly, is the timing. Search Twitter for references to Vance and Murdoch and you’ll find numerous claims that the Montana meeting happened last Tuesday, coincidentally just 48 hours before Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper revealed the “bawdy” letter Trump allegedly once wrote to Epstein about the “wonderful secrets” they share. J.D. must have put Murdoch up to it!

 

The problem (well, one problem) is that the meeting didn’t happen last week. It happened last month, long before the Wall Street Journal published its scoop about the Epstein letter.

 

An ‘underpants gnome’ conspiracy.

 

The reference to “Tuesday” appears to have come from this story in the Associated Press, which Trump-haters started passing around eagerly as the conspiracy theory took off. They should have paused to check the date: That piece was written on June 11, not in the last few days. There’s no suspicious coincidence of timing between Vance’s visit and the Journal’s scoop.

 

But that fact in and of itself doesn’t kill the conspiracy theory; the plot could have simply required several weeks to execute. What kills it is the idea that J.D. would risk his political future by stabbing Trump in the back. What on earth would he gain by doing so?

 

The only way Vance gets to sit in the big chair before January 2029 is if Donald Trump keels over. Unless the plan is to induce a fatal cardiac episode by stressing him out with new Epstein revelations, there’s no scenario in which the president ends up being replaced in office by his VP. Even if the DOJ coughed up video of him and Epstein engaged in sexual felonies various and sundry, Trump still wouldn’t leave office.

 

Donald Trump will never, ever resign. His Cabinet will never invoke the 25^th Amendment against him, having been chosen for their positions largely based on the intensity of their sycophancy. And Congress will never remove him, in case there was any doubt after January 6. Whatever fig leaf Senate Republicans might need to invent to justify finding him not guilty—the video is a deepfake created by deep-staters Pam Bondi and Kash Patel—they would dutifully invent it.

 

The Vance conspiracy, in other words, is an “underpants gnome” conspiracy. Phase one: Leak damaging Epstein material on Trump. Phase two: ?????? Phase three: President J.D.

 

The only way Vance could usurp Trump is if GOP voters grew so angry at the president over his Epstein complicity that it became safer for congressional Republicans to impeach him than to oppose his impeachment. But that will never happen, either. The modern right has dispensed with morality so totally in accommodating itself to Trump’s leadership that if proof emerged of his involvement in pedophilia, it would strain to discredit that proof in order to avoid having to discredit him. Hasn’t it begun already?

 

This is a movement that will treat compelling evidence that the president is a sexual predator as reason to pay less attention to the subject, not more. I’m astonished that Resistance libs who’ve spent 10 years accurately diagnosing that movement as a cult would now pay it the compliment of imagining that it might have some moral principle more exalted than serving Donald Trump.

 

So Vance will gain nothing from heavy media coverage of Trump’s relationship with Epstein. If anything, he has much to lose.

 

High risk, no reward.

 

As things stand now, the VP is running away with the 2028 Republican presidential primary. One recent poll placed him at 42 percent, 33 points ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As long as Trump and Trumpism remain in reasonably good political standing, J.D. is on a glide path to the nomination. All he needs to do is hug the president and hope that Donald Trump Jr. and/or Tucker Carlson can be convinced not to challenge him.

 

An Epstein scandal for Trump would complicate that. The more intense the stench gets around the president, the more some of that stink risks getting on Vance. He could end up with a problem like the one Kamala Harris had last year, being too close to a leader for whom the country had developed bitter disdain.

 

Every time J.D. is forced to spin a new Epstein revelation on Trump’s behalf, that problem will get worse. And if the White House and the DOJ succeed in suppressing most of the federal government’s files in the case, Vance will come to be suspected of involvement in the cover-up the same way Harris is dogged by suspicions of what she knew about Joe Biden’s decline. In fact, populist influencers have already noticed the VP’s suspicious loss of curiosity in all things Epstein since being sworn in. How will Vance explain that to them if this drags on?

 

It might even end up as a fruitful line of attack in the next primary if I’m right that “fundamentalist MAGA” will challenge mainline MAGA for control of the party in 2028. Imagine Carlson on a debate stage reminding populists that, unlike the vice president, he never stopped trying to get to the truth about Jeffrey Epstein for them.

 

And in the meantime, there’s enormous political risk for Vance in working against Trump. The president can’t fire his VP, but he sure can make life miserable for him, the same way he’s making it miserable for the similarly unfireable Jerome Powell. If Trump sniffed out a palace coup ringled by J.D., he would declare Vance a supreme traitor to MAGA and sideline him for the rest of his term. The only way that wouldn’t end in political oblivion for the vice president is, again, if the right were to take sides against Trump in the Epstein matter. And, again, the right isn’t going to do that.

 

Vance is many things, but he isn’t stupid. And he’d have to be awfully stupid to conspire against the president with Rupert Murdoch by jetting out to meet with Murdoch in person, making his whereabouts publicly known, instead of communicating with him surreptitiously through secret channels.

 

The smart play for him on Epstein is the smart play on everything: to be a good soldier for Trump, keep his head down, and hope to be anointed as his successor in 2028. Unless the GOP starts to tire of the president, and there’s no reason to think it is, Vance has no incentive to do otherwise. And if we do reach that point of exhaustion, Trump will be so tainted that he’ll almost certainly drag J.D. down with him. Why would Republicans nominate the right-hand man of a leader whom they had come to view as disgraced?

 

“This is all very Resistance Twitter 2017/2018 ‘the walls are closing in’ energy,” journalist Yashar Ali sniffed of the Vance conspiracy. That’s right. And that’s the only interesting thing about it.

 

Coping with impotence.

 

Until now, liberals hadn’t produced much vintage #Resistance-era agitation during the first six months of Trump’s new term. In 2017, they were so amped up to signal their opposition that they held a gigantic march on his second day as president. Eight years later, they’re too wrapped up in hating each other to get organized.

 

Conspiracy fever on the left has also cooled. I remember vividly the 2017-18 “energy” that Ali describes, when every day brought false hope to anti-Trump media that Robert Mueller and Michael Avenatti(!!) were about to unravel the many cover-ups of which the president was guilty. Why, he’d be out of office in no time.

 

You can understand why #Resistance types were prone to believing at the time that “the walls are closing in.” Trump’s 2016 victory had been fluky, Mueller had the resources of the Justice Department behind him, and we hadn’t yet entered the off-the-rails period of Trumpism beginning in early 2020. It didn’t seem far-fetched that his presidency was a great aberration and that a deus ex machina might arrive to end that aberration early.

 

All of that optimism is gone now. Trump proved he’s no fluke when he won the national popular vote last year. The Justice Department is under the control of servile toadies like Bondi and Patel. And there are lots of actual outrages to consume one’s attention, in some cases stranger than any fiction that a conspiracy theorist might imagine. Trump is already sending gay hairdressers to foreign gulags on suspicion of being gangsters and selling presidential access to investors in his personal memecoin, right out in the open.

 

His critics are waaaay past believing that anyone is coming to rescue America from him. If 2017 was anti-Trumpers’ “Great Pumpkin” phase, 2025 is their “God is dead” phase. The walls aren’t closing in and there’s no sense pretending that they are.

 

Even so, the supposed Vance conspiracy has a few things going for it that might have juiced a little atavistic Resistance “energy” among liberals.

 

For one thing, it’s an opportunity for the left to use the Epstein saga as a political weapon. It’s strange that interest in that has become “right-coded” more than “left-coded” over time, given that Epstein died in federal prison under a Republican president, who, uh, used to be his good friend. But because of Epstein’s relationship with Bill Clinton, and because suspicions about a great ruling-class cabal of pedophiles became a core part of QAnon mythology, Democrats have mostly sat back while Republicans demagogued Epstein aggressively.

 

Now that Trump is on the defensive, go figure that liberals who resented having the right use it as a cudgel against them might dive chest-deep into conspiracy theories at the president’s expense, including one about his own VP plotting to ruin him.

 

Relatedly, it’s without precedent for the populist right to be divided at a moment when Trump has been politically cornered. The Vance conspiracy might be stupid, but it’s also an irresistible opportunity for the left to sow further discord within the GOP, possibly even between the president and his vice president. Trump is already spooked enough about Epstein that he seems to have entered a sort of manic phase in trying to change the subject; if it gets in his head that J.D. is plotting against him with his frenemy Rupert, there’s no telling what sort of internecine right-wing mischief might result.

 

That might explain the “underpants gnome” nature of the theory. There doesn’t need to be a “phase two.” Trump just needs to think there is, and it might cause him to spazz out. Liberals are playing a mind game with a paranoid, disordered mind and the many paranoid, disordered minds that support him.

 

Impotence.

 

Usually, though, conspiracy theories are best explained as coping mechanisms for feelings of fear and impotence. It’s terrifying to think that a single determined commie simp could assassinate a U.S. president; it’s less terrifying to think that a sophisticated operation like the CIA that’s answerable to the American public might have. Ditto for 9/11, which is a testament to the omniscient power of the U.S. government if it’s an inside job and a testament to that same government’s frightening inability to protect its people if it isn’t.

 

Democrats have every reason to feel politically powerless right now, even relative to 2017. Trump and the GOP controlled the White House and Congress both then and now, but back then, liberals could reassure themselves that institutions were on their side and ready to protect them from a madman. The courts, the civil service, corporate America, the media—the Resistance was broad and deep even if it momentarily lacked legislative power.

 

The courts are still hanging in there (although not for long), but the rest have to greater and lesser degrees either knuckled under, been purged, or been overtaken by Trump and his disciples. If the last eight years stand for anything, it’s that the left isn’t up to the task of stopping the Trumpist right.

 

No wonder, then, that Resistance libs might cotton to a conspiracy theory in which the right is up to the task. It’s the height of silliness to believe that J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, or especially Rupert Murdoch—who’s been trying to turn the page on MAGA for years, with no luck—might wield the power to rid America of Trump. The richest man in history, another right-winger, has spent the past month or so tangling with him and has gotten his clock cleaned politically for his trouble. But it’s still easier to imagine Elon Musk, or Vance, or Murdoch, hatching a master plan that sinks the president than it is to imagine any Democrat doing so. There’s not a single truly formidable figure in the party right now, and liberals know it.

 

So maybe the Vance conspiracy is a form of cope at a difficult moment, nothing more or less. The left is anxious and exasperated at the thought that we’re still only one-eighth through this nightmare, and this is what they’ve latched onto for comfort that it might somehow end sooner than we think.