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.
