IT’S MORNING IN AMERICA AGAIN—not in any of the big, important ways, but at least around here. Right now, we’re offering a free 30-day Bulwark+ trial. If you’ve never dipped your toe in to get the full Triad experience or any of other members-only newsletters and podcasts, why not come check out what a hundred thousand of your future pals have been raving about?

Get 30 day free trial

Happy Tuesday.

Eternal Sunshine of the Crackpot Mind

by Andrew Egger

During the heyday of the 2008 campaign and the early years of the administration, staff for Barack Obama got a remarkable lesson in the unsquashability of the conspiracy-addled mind. As the “birther” theory that Obama had actually been born in Kenya was taking root—first on email listservs, then around the broader internet—those staffers initially hoped to treat it as beneath notice. But the theory soon spread broadly enough that they felt obliged to respond—only to watch in amazement as the various proofs they offered, from his Hawaii birth certificate to state records to contemporaneous newspaper announcements, failed to squash the conspiracy. Instead, the conspiracists took each proof in turn as further evidence of a still-grander coverup.

“This lingered out there over the course of years,” Ben LaBolt, Obama’s spokesman during the campaign and in the White House, told The Bulwark. “Not only did we have to produce the actual birth certificates but once it was produced, they were like, ‘That’s not the actual birth certificate. It’s not the long form one!’”

The lesson, LaBolt and others learned, was deeply sobering: It’s damn near impossible to convince a conspiracy theorist that they’re living in lunacy. The only real remedy is to try and change the subject or to shrink down the conspiracy to a less politically damaging size.

“It is just incredibly hard to produce documentation that will dissuade people because they are primed for disbelief,” said LaBolt. “If you satisfy the vast majority of rational people then you need to take that as a win.”

This week, one of the most infamous proponents of the birther conspiracy theory—an individual who LaBolt and company never did manage to satisfy—is having some conspiracy-theory problems of his own. And it’s not clear that Donald Trump will be content with satisfying “the vast majority of rational people” in his response.

There are two ways you can look at Team Trump’s on-a-dime pivot on the Jeffrey Epstein matter. One possibility is that the government is sitting on information that really does make Trump himself look bad. This is not exactly implausible: Trump palled around with Epstein for years and was perhaps the last guy on earth defending Ghislaine Maxwell.

The other possibility is simply that, after years of cultivating the Epstein-conspiracy beast for political gain, the White House has suddenly realized to its horror that it is incapable now of cooking up a meal that can satisfy the monster’s hunger.

When Trump promised on the campaign trail to release the Epstein files, hardcore Epstein truthers, who overlap substantially with other Trump-focused conspiracy movements, didn’t take him merely to be saying he’d open up the books so everyone could kick the tires and satisfy their curiosity. They took him to be endorsing their maximalist reading of the case—that the government was sitting on a massive trove of smoking-gun evidence that would lead to the downfall of a vast cabal of satanist pedophile Democrats and other diabolical elites.

That the White House had underestimated their thirst for this outcome was obvious when Attorney General Pam Bondi, to much fanfare, released binders of “Epstein files” to a clutch of goofball MAGA influencers. It was slop for the piggies; there was nothing new in the files. When the hardcore conspiracists discovered this, they weren’t thrilled. Okay, but when do we get the televised execution of Oprah?

In his lizard-brain way, Trump gets the conspiratorial mind better than most; he senses that conspiracies cannot really be debunked, they can only be redirected. This might be why, in his personal attempt to end the story with a Truth Social post over the weekend, he tried to supplant the Epstein conspiracy with a brand-new, even grander conspiracy: that “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration” had created the Epstein files to hurt him and that “now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.” It echoes, in a way, his response to Obama releasing his birth certificate, in which he took credit for the disclosure and suggested it might not be real—and then, a year later, declared he’d make a $5 million donation to charity if Obama produced his college application and passport records.

It’s a transparent attempt to keep the conspiracy growing. But it’s also pretty weak tea compared to the conspiracy the Epstein maximalists already think they’re onto. Trump, so good over the years at whipping his people into greater and greater delusional frenzies, may be learning it’s much harder to command his base not to care about this one.

Sam Stein contributed to this reporting.