Washington: OK, so President Donald Trump’s name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files. But who put it there? Could it possibly have been Barack Obama from his prison cell? Or a tranquillised Hillary Clinton? Oh wait, maybe it was etched onto the documents by Joe Biden’s magical autopen.

Or is that mixing up different scandals? It’s so hard to keep up with the latest wild notions circulating in the capital and beyond. Washington is awash in conspiracy theories these days, a cascade of suspicion and intrigue promoted or denied in the Oval Office, ricocheting around Capitol Hill and cable news and propelled at warp speed across social media.

Donald Trump speaks to reporters in Scotland on Friday.Credit: AP

No commander-in-chief in his lifetime has been as consumed by conspiracy theories as Trump, and now they seem to be consuming him. They have been the rocket fuel for his political career since the days when he spread the lie that Obama was secretly born overseas and therefore not eligible to be president. More than a decade later, Trump is coming full circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory with a new-and-improved one about Obama supposedly committing treason.

The harmonic convergence of competing conspiracies has overshadowed critical policy issues facing America’s leaders at the moment, whether it’s new tariffs that could dramatically reshape the global economy or the collapse of ceasefire talks meant to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The Epstein matter so spooked Speaker Mike Johnson that he abruptly recessed the House for the summer rather than confront it. The allegations lodged against Obama so outraged the former president that he emerged from political hibernation to express his indignation at even having to address them.

The whispers and questions – “this nonsense,” as Trump put it – followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed on Friday for a visit to his golf club.

“You’re making a very big thing over something that’s not a big thing,” he complained to reporters, suggesting, in his latest bid at conspiracy deflection, that instead of him, the news media should be looking at Epstein’s other boldface friends like former president Bill Clinton. “Don’t talk about Trump,” he said.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1997.Credit: Getty

“I’m not focused on the conspiracy theories that you are,” he added. True enough. He is focused on other conspiracy theories.

It says something about the evolution of politics in the Trump era that a sexual predator who has been dead for six years could suddenly dominate the national conversation again with little new information to change the essential understanding of the case. But then again, the allegations that the president raised against Obama regarding the Russian election interference investigation go back nine years and have been previously scrutinised without finding proof of the perfidy that Trump........

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