Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump has been at odds with his MAGA base like never before.His administration has said it will not disclose any further information on the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump has railed against his own supporters for not falling in line with the current narrative.President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 1992.Meanwhile, Democrats have taken him to task, highlighting how the right claimed that Trump’s election would lead to further disclosures. But now the GOP has stonewalled any attempts at transparency and possibly implicating Trump himself in the fallout.Led by Trump, conservatives spent years pushing conspiracy theories about Epstein and his death because it fed into longstanding narratives about the elite and Democrats. Supporters told themselves that Epstein’s sex trafficking was used to benefit the super-rich and that Democrats were covering it all up for the purported “globalists” they work in concert with.But this isn’t a recent development. Modern conservatism has always been obsessed with this kind of wild conspiracy thinking.The John Birch right takes controlThe extremist John Birch Society rose to prominence on the right in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the rise of the so-called “liberal” world order under leaders like Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. But it wasn’t enough for Birchers to simply oppose liberal ideas; they had to indulge in bizarre conspiracies, like the notion that the population was being brainwashed to support communism via fluoridated water.After the conservative uprising that led to Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and his acolytes taking control of the party—and losing the 1964 election in a landslide—the conspiracy-first mindset, described as “the paranoid style,” became the default on the right.Paranoia goes mainstreamWhile some GOP leaders like Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush stoked conspiratorial fires over and over, there was an understanding that this brand of extremism was a political nonstarter. Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary ClintonThe Republican establishment wanted the votes of conspiracy true believers without the public humiliation of standing by easily debunked absurdities.This began to change after President Bill Clinton ascended to the White House in 1993. Frustrated by Clinton’s win, conservatives openly accused him and Hillary Clinton of operating a drug-trafficking ring and committing a series of murders, among many other easily debunked conspiracies.This reached a fevered pitch when President Barack Obama was elected. The right couldn’t accept the legitimacy of a Black president and embraced the “birther” conspiracy, claiming that his birth certificate was false and that he was really Kenyan. Of course, Trump was the most prominent booster of this racist smear.Figures once on the outside, like Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, became normalized under Trump and the MAGA movement.Suddenly, the right began openly accusing Democrats of being part of a child sex-trafficking ring called “Pizzagate,” which inspired believers to commit crimes, including the Alex Jones fan who stalked a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant to liberate children from the establishment’s nonexistent basement.Conspiracies mean simple answersIn a complex world with horrible things constantly happening that seem to defy explanation, conspiracy theories help to make things “make sense.” The right grasps onto these theories as a way to explain why the world doesn’t go their way.Trump supporters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection of the U.S. Capitol ignited by the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen.For instance, many Republicans have simply never believed that a Black person is qualified to be president. Obama purportedly being a Kenyan with a sprawling conspiracy keeping him in office appears to them as a rational explanation.Similarly, following Trump’s disastrous first term, many on the right had convinced themselves that he did a great job. Instead of reckoning with failures like the COVID-119 death toll on his watch, the right—led by Trump—argued that the 2020 election was stolen.Republicans have capitalized on this mindset, feeding their supporters a steady stream of conspiratorial nonsense, including debunked theories about the origins of COVID-19 and the QAnon conspiracy that involves elites attacking children for their blood.Trapped in their own trapConspiratorial thinking is the domain of the right. But in the Epstein saga, Republicans are suffering from backlash to something that they created. The story has morphed from something to easily associate with the left into a story being suppressed by one of their own, Trump.Related | Trump and MAGA turn on each other over Epstein filesNow, a culture that has told conservatives not to believe evidence that they witness with their own eyes is instructing them to simply drop it and move on. That is proving difficult for many and impossible for some.Trump wants the right to shut up about this storyline, either because his administration realizes there’s nothing there to expose, or because Trump himself is directly implicated. But his own MAGA world has been told for so long that this event is the easy solution to so many of their problems, so they aren’t so willing to let it go.The right needs this conspiracy to be true so reality can be explained away. Trump can’t stop it, he’s just along for the ride.