The Danger of Conspiracy Politics

It always comes back to bite you

There’s a fun problem that mathematicians study called ‘square packing’. Essentially, the goal is to get a certain number of squares into a larger square in the most efficient, space-saving way possible. For some numbers, this is easy. Four squares and nine squares create a perfect larger square when lined up in a grid - a visually pleasing result:

For other numbers, it’s a bit trickier. Four and nine are square numbers, so if we add one more square (five and ten), those numbers won’t perfectly fill a square. But the optimal result still seems intuitive and visually pleasing:

These results are aesthetically beautiful. They show that even when numbers aren’t perfect, there’s an order and a rational pattern to how the world behaves. Surely if we take the next square number (sixteen) and add one, we’ll get a similar result for the best way to pack seventeen squares:

People hate this. Not metaphorically, this obscure mathematics result got nearly 2000 upvotes in the ‘Thanks I Hate It’ subreddit. It’s labelled as one of the most unsatisfying puzzles of all time. Any time it’s mentioned online as a fun fact people express a certain kind of disgust, a disbelief that this ugly weird mishmash could possibly be the best we can do for 17 squares. Can this really be the best we’ve got? What happened to symmetry, to intuitive beauty?

I find the 17 squares problem to be an excellent metaphor for politics. People want so very badly for the world to work in neat ways. They want to be able to analyze the world through a single intuitive lens and have the aesthetically pleasing solution appear as if by magic. If you’re a libertarian, this means that markets can never fail and the state causes all problems. If you’re a socialist, it means private capital causes all problems and giving power to the workers can’t fail. If you’re a Trump fan, whatever Trump says is part of a master plan. And for certain simple problems, you might be right. The four-square and the five-square examples do exist. Some problems just require basic theory and the solution is obvious.

But most numbers aren’t perfect squares, and most public policy problems aren’t easy to fix with One Simple Trick. The real world is messy. The correct policy is usually an ugly, improvised kludge that nobody really appreciates and that doesn’t validate anybody’s theory. Fittingly, we’re not even sure that the image above is the best fit for 17 squares - it’s the best any mathematician has been able to do yet, but we haven’t proven it to be optimal. Most public policy is like that as well. Politics is the art of smushing together 17 squares in a way that leaves no ideologue happy but that gets the job done.

I think the 17 squares above also tell us a lot about how and why people dive into conspiracy theories.

---

Americans have long been obsessed with theories about Jeffrey Epstein. It makes sense - Epstein was a billionaire, he was well-connected with famous names, and he was a sex trafficker of children. Who did he know? Which famous names were connected to his crimes? Who else assaulted those girls and women? Did he have dirt on any of those famous people? Did he blackmail them? And above all, did he really kill himself or was he silenced before he could spill the beans?

People from all political stripes are interested in the Epstein story, but it’s been a particular focus of the MAGA movement. Trump repeatedly said he would release the files if elected, and his fans talked about it constantly. MAGA influencers and commentators have been focused on the Epstein story for years, which is why Trump’s sudden about face has come as such a betrayal.

Spaces like /r/conspiracy have turned into outright pro-Trump subreddits since 2016 - see how much they celebrated his 2024 win. But they’re now furious that the Trump administration says that Epstein’s death was a suicide and no client list exists. The /r/conservative subreddit is also up in arms. Conservative social media is in open revolt - even on his home turf, Truth Social, Trump was ratio’d by angry commenters for telling people to shut up about Epstein. Podcast bros who previously yukked it up with Trump are now indignant. Officials like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel are threatening to resign over the perceived failure to address the Epstein issue, and even hardcore pro-Trump media figures like Benny Johnson¹, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones are questioning the decision.

The conspiracy wing of American politics is close to abandoning Trump over the Epstein files, but that raises an important question - why did all the conspiracy theorists love Trump in the first place? And what do we do about it?

---

There are several reasons why the Republican party has become the party of conspiracy theories. You can go back to The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which is still relevant after all these years to explain the far right’s tendency to blame things on Jewish bankers, masons, race mixing and shadowy international cabals. The John Birch Society has a long history of crankishness. The libertarian movement has long been a mixture of idealistic free marketers and outright racists. But Trump’s takeover of right wing politics accelerated this trend.

Part of the acceleration is simply the Republican party’s drifting further and further right. As the party’s base became more openly authoritarian, that base also became more open to conspiracy theories. It’s only natural that when you’re far from the mainstream in one direction you’re more likely to accept far-from-mainstream theories in other directions as well. But Trump himself has always indulged in conspiracy bait. Even before he was running for president, he pushed birther theories about Obama not being born an American citizen. His political rise was powered by conspiracy groups like QAnon. As president he pushed election conspiracy theories - even when he won, he’d argue without any evidence that there had been widespread fraud. In the past he’s even retweeted theories that the Clintons were responsible for killing Epstein!

Trump’s defining feature as a politician is his lack of shame. He has no compunction whatsoever about lying. He’ll say absolutely anything to anyone to get what he wants. He’ll repeat whatever seems popular, whatever will get him applause. He will promise things with no intention to deliver. Other politicians are held back by basic norms of conduct - it’s bad to say things that are obviously false or obviously racist or obviously insane. Trump is not held back by norms. Contrast John McCain shutting down a voter who called Obama an Arab with Trump’s embrace of Obama birtherism.

This lack of shame served Trump well and helped him win over America’s most gullible voters. He was more than happy to say “Yeah, we should look into that Epstein stuff, I believe all the same theories as you, and when I’m president you’ll get the real information.” He naturally talks like a conspiracy theorist - his speeches are littered with phrases like “I don’t know but…”, “Many people are saying…”, “Some people tell me…”. He rarely directly states the idea but he’s always leaving the door open. It’s hard to read the man’s mind, but Trump’s conspiratorial leanings seem partially like an authentic tendency and partially like a cynical form of pandering.

Trump is both cause and effect in the Republican turn toward conspiracies. A president like Trump was only possible because conservatism was already fertile for his approach to politics, but by virtue of his personal shamelessness he’s greatly accelerated the process. It’s why we see the crank realignment where all the kooks who’d traditionally be Democratic kooks - Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, etc - have joined forces with Trump.

There’s one other major cause of conservative conspiracism that’s not polite acknowledge out loud, but Republicans are rapidly becoming the party of stupid people. Insiders have bemoaned the wonk gap for decades - where ‘wonk gap’ is a polite way of saying that for any given policy area like health care, there are ten times as many smart Democratic policy analysts as there are smart Republican policy analysts. That was true in 2010 and it’s an order of magnitude more true today.

But beyond the wonks, voters themselves are now deeply polarized on education:

Americans with a college degree voted for Harris in 2024 by 16 points, while non-college voters went for Trump by 14 points. And it’s even worse if you look at graduate degree holders (Harris +32) vs high-school-or-less (Trump +20).

The core of Trump’s coalition is white voters who’ve never stepped foot in a college classroom. It’s not an accident that it’s right wing militias who are targeting weather radar systems in Oklahoma, because they believe that radar stations are somehow controlling the weather. It’s why the current director of the EPA is ranting about chemtrails in public.

Not every Trump voter is a moron, but the Trump movement writ large massively over-indexes on people who have the brainpower of slug. The stupider your voting base, the more likely they are to believe conspiracy theories, the more likely they are to be swayed by charlatans who promise them they’ll uncover the real truth that other politicians are hiding. And ‘elite pedophile cabal’ is basically the ur-conspiracy that unites every strand of right wing crank.

---

The simple truth is that Jeffrey Epstein almost certainly killed himself. This should not be surprising to anyone. Epstein was a billionaire who lived one of the most indulgent, privileged lifestyles imaginable. When he was arrested, he faced the prospect of life in prison - and not just life in prison, but life in prison as the world’s most famous child sex predator. Of course he’d be eager to kill himself.

Likewise, I believe the Justice Department’s repeated insistence through several administrations that there is no ‘client list’ being kept secret. There’s still plenty of real evidence! You can read witness testimony from women like Virginia Giuffre, who has publicly accused men like Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew of complicity in Epstein’s crimes. You can read flight logs and documents that have been publicly released - although they’re of limited value, because Epstein had plenty of connections and meetings with non-sex-offender famous people (or do you think Stephen Hawking was getting freaky?).

But these are the documents and allegations that actually exist, that we have evidence for. Beyond that, why would Epstein keep a centralized document listing his crimes and every single person who joined him in those crimes?

Or as Stringer Bell put it:

If these conclusions are difficult for you to accept, I get it. Attorney General Pam Bondi said at one point that the client list was sitting on her desk. She was lying to you. There’s something weird going on with that footage, right? Sometimes weird things happen. William Barr personally reviewed the footage years ago and says it’s all clean, despite the missing minute in recently released footage.

I’d invite you to contemplate the 17 squares again. The real world is chaotic and imprecise and frustrating. People make mistakes and lie and exaggerate. We’re not going to find a precise catalog of every person implicated in sinister island sex crimes just because it would wrap things up really nicely. There’s no elite cabal flawlessly orchestrating events from the shadows. Sure, it would be more aesthetically pleasing if we had a neat list and a centralized organization of bad guys to blame. But the real world is messy, and what we’ve actually got is a guy who killed himself in a prison cell and left far more questions than answers behind.

---

So what should Democrats do about this situation?

There are many commentators calling on Democrats to wage a full-out war on the Epstein issue. They sense real weakness - Trump’s core base is more angry with him than they’ve ever been. They were deeply invested in the conspiracy and feel betrayed by Trump. And liberals have been struggling with non-college voters and need to bring some of them back into the tent if they want to win elections.

But Democrats should be cautious before going all-in on Epstein. By all means, call out Trump’s hypocrisy. Call out how he lies to his own fans, call out how he promises them things and then breaks those promises. It’s clear a pattern for Trump. He led “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton at nearly every rally he held for the 2016 election, but after the election was over he immediately said ‘we don’t care about that anymore’. He has no problem throwing his own fans garbage when he’s promised them gold.

Voters understand hypocrisy. Democrats can message on that. They can also talk about Trump’s shady association with Epstein, and they can certainly laugh at all the infighting happening in the MAGA camp. It’s very funny that Elon says Steve Bannon is in the Epstein files. But going any further isn’t just morally questionable - it’s counterproductive. The real lesson of the MAGA Conspiracy Implosion is that you can lie to voters for a little while. But eventually voters do notice when you aren’t delivering on your promises, and they’ll punish you for it.

Voters, being frank, are often stupid. But you can’t fool them forever. When you say your policies won’t cause inflation but they do, voters notice. When you say your new policing strategy won’t cause crime to jump, but it does, voters notice. Those issues lost Democrats the 2024 election. Now Trump is being punished because he’s promised something he couldn’t deliver. Voters love big promises, but they notice when those promises are broken.

That’s why Democrats should be cautious about going all-in on Epstein politics. Yes, it would be nice if morons weren’t an R+50 group because there are a hell of a lot of morons in this country. But you’re not going to win those people in a lasting way by promising them the REAL Epstein client list, because the real client list doesn’t exist. You’re not going to earn their trust by promising to expose who really killed Epstein, because he killed himself. You can yell about how Trump joined in on Epstein’s crimes, but there’s no hard evidence of that whatsoever. Trump is being punished right now for lying, for over-promising and then refusing to deliver. Go after Trump for that, but don’t the same mistake he did.

1. Yes, the same Benny Johnson that was caught taking money from Russia to push pro-Russia narratives.