The Hidden Hand

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 20, 2026

 

Last week the vice president thrilled the crowd in a mostly empty arena in Georgia by hinting that Pizzagate was back on the administration’s menu.

 

“Pizzagate” is an old-school Trumpist conspiracy theory and forerunner of QAnon.

 

It emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign when populists sifting through the hacked John Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks convinced themselves that the messages proved the existence of a pedophile ring run by Democratic elites.

 

The proof? References in the emails to … pizza, supposedly code for child sex abuse.

 

Believers at the time even zeroed in on a particular Washington-area pizzeria as the site where children were being held captive. A month after that year’s election, a man drove up from North Carolina with an AR-15 rifle and fired at least one shot on the premises, hoping to free the wee prisoners inside.

 

Pizzagate lost relevance over time, usurped by marginally less insane conspiracy theories about rigged elections and the “deep state.” So it felt newsy when J.D. Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd last Tuesday that mentions of pizza and grape soda in some of the Jeffrey Epstein files had piqued his interest. “I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory,” he marveled at the language. "We should absolutely investigate."

 

That was interesting for two reasons.

 

First, at a moment when swing voters and even certain “America First” postliberals are experiencing buyer’s remorse, it was useful of the VP to remind the country that Donald Trump’s movement has always been powered by febrile cranks and grifting sociopaths keen to monetize their paranoia. A Trump/Vance voter in 2024 may not have known they were voting for war with Iran, but they certainly knew they were voting for kakistocracy. No excuses.

 

I also found it interesting that the vice president would seek solace in a pre-Trump conspiracy theory when his boss is facing the toughest sledding of his political career.

 

The right-wing base struggled during his first term to explain why their hero, now wielding the powers of the presidency, didn’t expose America’s Satanic cabal of left-wing child molesters. Their solution was QAnon. Trump was working to expose the cabal, QAnoners insisted, but was following a secret, inscrutable plan designed to outflank the bad guys’ powerful deep-state protectors. Only by deciphering certain clues in his statements and other online messages could one discern the truth of what he was up to.

 

That theory is a harder sell now, more than a year into the president’s second term. Trump still hasn’t outed the cabal. The Epstein files, allegedly the smoking gun of systematic Democratic sex predation, have generated no revelatory arrests. And the all-powerful deep state no longer seems so powerful: Slavish MAGA cronies hold the top positions at the Justice Department and intelligence bureaus, depriving the White House of its first-term excuse for not busting left-wing kiddie-touchers immediately.

 

That disappointment is destined to compound the more mundane political disappointments some populists feel about this presidency—an unexpected and aimless war, high gas prices and the return of inflation, occasional blasphemy equating Trump with Jesus Christ. If conspiracy theories are a response to helplessness, seeking a hidden hand somewhere to explain a world that’s grown confusing and frighteningly chaotic, what do you do when the leader you support attains near-autocratic power?

 

How do you account for unpleasant realities when it’s your guy who’s in control of events?

 

Vance’s nod to Pizzagate was a lame attempt to temper the disappointment of Trump true believers by teasing the possibility that the truth is still out there, that the glorious effort to unravel the cabal is ongoing and may yet hit paydirt. But it’s not the only conspiracy theory to which right-wing populists have resorted lately to try to navigate a difficult political moment.

 

The others are considerably less flattering to Trump than the VP’s is, needless to say. It may have taken 10 years, but some of the leopards have at last come to eat the president’s own face.

 

Weak form.

 

There are two types of anti-Trump theories. They’re driven by the same impulse—embarrassment at the president—but are divided with respect to how much culpability they assign him for his behavior.

 

Weak-form theories treat Trump as a dupe of some more powerful sinister force, a variation of the pitiful “good czar, bad boyars” excuse-making that’s typified Republican apologism for the past 10 years. Whenever he behaves indefensibly, most of the GOP commentariat reflexively leaps to shift blame from him to his deputies: “Whoever advised him to do this should be fired!” As if it’s Susie Wiles who’s egging him on to post images of himself healing the sick.

 

Conspiracy theories that treat the president as a pawn in someone else’s game are easier to digest for a right-wing audience conditioned to believe that their idol is inerrant when left to his own devices. (Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed.) Where the theories depart from that orthodoxy is in suggesting that he does bear some responsibility for his own terrible actions, attributing a degree of agency to him that’s rare in postliberal commentary.

 

A nice example of a weak-form conspiracy theory is Christian pastor Joel Webbon writing “I genuinely believe Trump is currently demon-possessed” after the president posted an image of himself as Jesus. On the one hand, laying blame for the incident on Trump himself instead of on his aides is a MAGA rarity; on the other hand, Webbon ultimately absolves him of moral culpability for his blasphemy by speculating that Satan himself has conspired to influence him.

 

It’s essentially the ol’ “Whoever advised him to do this should be fired!” gambit except with Beelzebub as the adviser.

 

A more earthly weak-form conspiracy theory about Trump being pushed comes from Tucker Carlson, who also believes the president is under the sway of a diabolical influence. But it’s not Mephistopheles who’s pulling the strings in Tucker’s scenario, it’s—well, guess.

 

“Establishment media never reports this, but the Israeli government has a storied history of blackmailing U.S. presidents,” he claimed recently in his daily newsletter. In an interview with the BBC, he went as far as to call Trump a “slave,” asserting that “he is not free in this moment at all to do what he thinks is best for himself or his country” with respect to the war in Iran.

 

Comparing the most powerful man in the world to a slave with respect to the coercion he’s supposedly under is a bold new frontier in denying Trump agency in his own screw-ups. Yet when the interviewer confronted Carlson by reminding him that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all resisted Israeli lobbying to attack Iran, Tucker conceded the point: “They did, and I wish our current president had, but he didn’t.”

 

That’s the logic of weak-form conspiracy theories in a nutshell, in which the president both is and isn’t responsible for his sins and mistakes. You can understand why it would appeal to figures like Webbon and Carlson, as both cater to audiences whose enmity toward Trump is likely to be less intense than theirs is. Evangelicals as a group are famously MAGA, and the Republican voters whom Tucker is hoping to woo over to postliberalism remain much more favorably disposed to the president than to him.

 

If you’re trying to convince a very Trumpy cohort that he’s done something awful, you need to tread lightly and flatter their prejudices a bit. “The president’s actions are evil, but it’s because he’s under duress from some evil figure” is the way to square the circle.

 

Strong form.

 

Strong-form anti-Trump conspiracy theories, by contrast, treat the president as the prime mover in his own failures and transgressions. These theories are for former cultists who, unlike Carlson, have reached the point of disillusionment where they’re willing to burn their bridges to Trump and his loyalists. There may indeed be a sinister conspiracy afoot, they’ll tell you—but the president isn’t the target of it. He’s leading it.

 

The most extreme strong-form theory circulating at the moment is the possibility that Trump is the honest-to-goodness Antichrist. He isn’t possessed by a demon in this scenario; he is the demon, the Great Deceiver mocking Jesus on Truth Social. If you’re a devout Christian who’s reached your breaking point over, well, everything—the lavish corruption, the surprise wars, the egregious blasphemy—and are looking to purge yourself of all ties to the president’s movement, “he might be the Antichrist” is an efficient way to do it.

 

Nothing says “I regret my vote” as emphatically as accusing your candidate of being the prophesied Beast from Revelation, right?

 

There’s another strong-form theory that’s been picking up online this week for those whose taste in conspiracies runs less supernatural. On Saturday, Trump friend-turned-enemy Marjorie Taylor Greene wondered if we’ll ever learn the real story behind the assassination attempt on the president in Pennsylvania in 2024. “Corey Comperatore’s family deserves to know the truth about … what happened in Butler on July 13, 2024,” she claimed, referencing the rallygoer who was killed by a stray bullet. “President Trump, of all people, should be leading the charge. Why isn’t he?”

 

Greene’s tweet amplified a viral post by a Republican delegate to the 2024 convention arguing that elements of that day seemed suspicious—Trump bloodied but not really hurt, the iconic too-perfect photo of him pumping his fist in front of the flag, his supposed disinterest afterward in investigating the matter. And those suspicions are shared: Tim Dillon, a comedian and popular podcaster who backed the president in 2024 before growing disenchanted, also accused him last week of having orchestrated the assassination plot.

 

“Just admit you staged it in Butler,” he half-joked. “It was the heat of the campaign. People do crazy things in campaigns. I think—I’m speaking just for myself—I will not think less of you if you admit to staging and faking the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. I will be impressed by the level of coordination. Explain to us how you did it!”

 

Other MAGA influencers and various members of the populist hoi polloi online have likewise taken an interest in revisiting the episode lately. (“One of the clues is the Butler shooting,” Carlson hinted darkly in one recent rant about Iran, although he doesn’t seem to think it was Trump who was behind the plot but rather—well, guess.) Who can blame them? “Butler was staged!” is precisely the sort of thing the president himself would have alleged had it happened to any of his predecessors.

 

If the touchstone of weak-form anti-Trump conspiracy theories is duress, the touchstone of the strong-form variety is deception. Subscribers aren’t seeking to rationalize why the president is behaving the way he is, as the weak-formers are, so much as they’re seeking to rationalize why they voted for a guy whose commitment to “America First” turned out to be an inch deep. Are they stupid? Evil?

 

No, they were deceived. Trump deceived them in Butler, supposedly, in order to earn their sympathy, inspire them, and convince them that his reelection was providentially ordained. Or he deceived them in toto because he’s, well, the antichrist and deceiving people is what the antichrist does. Greene has actually floated both possibilities, evidence of how bitter her break with the president has been. Strong-form conspiracies are for those who are no longer willing to absolve Trump of every sin and therefore hope to absolve themselves of culpability for empowering the sinner.

 

The midterms: conspiracy Waterloo?

 

Notably, Pizzagate wasn’t the only conspiracy theory to which J.D. Vance alluded during his appearance in Georgia last week. Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika, now the head of Turning Point USA, was supposed to attend but backed out due to security concerns. And it was clear to everyone present, including the VP, how and where those concerns originated.

 

“To say that Erika Kirk wasn’t grieving her husband on that day,” he complained, naming no one in particular, “to say that Erika Kirk was somehow complicit in it, is so preposterous and so disgusting.”

 

He was right, of course. But one way to understand his credulity about Pizzagate and incredulity about Erika having had a hand in Charlie Kirk’s murder is that the White House desperately wants the grassroots right to stick to officially sanctioned conspiracy theories only. They don’t want Republicans to be less paranoid, they want them to be more selective in their paranoia.

 

Theories that help the president and his party are welcome, theories that attack or embarrass him are not.

 

I don’t think the timing is a coincidence. (There are no coincidences!) We’re just about six months out from an election that the White House is destined to try to disrupt by alleging some sort of massive vote-rigging conspiracy. It’s laying the groundwork right now, in fact, renewing demands that swing states turn over ballots cast in deep-blue counties in prior elections and vowing that arrests are coming soon in the Great Conspiracy of 2020.

 

Trump wants and needs populist Republicans to champion his next election conspiracy as enthusiastically as they did his last one, to turn the integrity of the midterms into just another polarized partisan issue in which only Democrats (and the odd RINO) are willing to say that the left won fair and square.

 

But I don’t think he’s going to get that this time.

 

The difference between 2020 and 2026 (besides the probable margin of Democratic victory) is that certain segments of the right will be motivated this fall to challenge the president’s claims of vote-rigging. If a blue wave descends in November, the last thing ambitious “America First”-ers like Carlson and Greene will want Republican voters to believe is that the left won by cheating. The left won because Trump abandoned his “America First” agenda, they’ll say. The results are a plausible, even predictable, reaction to a man who spent two years governing as an “Israel first” neocon. To win, we need to get back to real postliberalism.

 

For Tucker types hoping to steer the post-Trump GOP in their direction in 2028, it’s hugely important that the right not rationalize a Democratic wipeout as the product of a conspiracy. And so those types will resist it, even counterprogram it.

 

The anti-Trump conspiracy theories currently circulating on the right are an early warning of their intentions, I think. Whether the president is a dupe in someone else’s conspiracy or the instigator in his own, the message being sent is that he’s no longer as trustworthy as he used to be. When he tells us this fall that Democrats took back the House and Senate by cheating, not because gas is $4 per gallon or because the illegal Iran war failed to accomplish its goals or because Trump seemed far more interested in his ballroom than in bringing down the cost of living, postliberals are no longer expected to salute and take it on faith.

 

They’re expected to think, “It could be that Democrats cheated. Or it could be that this guy is possessed by a demon and/or Benjamin Netanyahu.”

 

Perhaps the right will surprise us and be a bit more skeptical all around this fall. As I said earlier, conspiracy theories are a way to make sense of events that are difficult psychologically for adherents to comprehend; with Trump at 37 percent job approval and 33-67 on the war, no one will need an elaborate scenario involving “ballot mules” to explain how Democrats could have won.

 

But it would be ironic if the president’s brazen anti-democratic power play were to fail not because it was too paranoid for his base, but because it wasn’t paranoid enough. The head of the leopards-eating-people’s-faces party deserves to see his next “rigged election!” conspiracy theory fizzle because his own voters are too consumed with whether he staged an attempt on his own life two years ago or might be about to sprout horns. Live by the crank, die by the crank.