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 tranquilized 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.

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 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.

Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that someone else had a hand in killing President John F. Kennedy, that the moon landings were faked, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s assassination.

Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, of course, or have some basis. But presidents generally have not been the ones spreading dubious stories. To the contrary, they traditionally have viewed their role as dispelling doubts and reinforcing faith in institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate his predecessor’s murder specifically to keep rumors and guesswork from proliferating. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.)

Trump, by contrast, relishes conspiracy theories, particularly those that benefit him or smear his enemies without any evident care for whether they are true or not. “There have been other conspiratorial political movements in the country’s past,” said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories. “But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.”

Conspiracy theories are not the exclusive preserve of Trump and the political right. Around the time of last month’s anniversary of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, some on the left once again advanced the notion that the whole shooting episode had been staged to make the Republican candidate into a political martyr.

Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them.

Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an act of transparency for historians and researchers that may shed important light on those episodes.

But Trump has gone beyond simple theory floating to make his own alternate reality official government policy. Some applicants for jobs in the second Trump administration were asked whether Trump won the 2020 election that he actually lost; those who gave the wrong answer were not helping their job prospects.