CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten on Tuesday revealed how right-wing conspiracy theories, like those tied to Jeffrey Epstein, have contributed to President Donald Trump’s popularity and, as of late, have fueled backlash over his administration’s handling of files tied to the late convicted sex offender.
“Donald Trump, from the very beginning, has been pushing conspiracy theories over and over and over again, and he has benefited from them historically,” declared Enten in a segment with CNN’s Sara Sidner. “And now, finally, it’s coming back to actually bite him.”
Epstein conspiracy theories have swirled around MAGA world over the years, with Trump supporters believing that the disgraced financier — who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges — kept a so-called “client list” to blackmail influential figures.
His supporters have also fueled conspiracy theories that Epstein was murdered and didn’t die by suicide.
The Justice Department and the FBI have indicated that Epstein was not murdered and didn’t have such a list, findings that sparked outrage among Trump supporters after they contradicted past claims by his officials.
In his segment on CNN, Enten highlighted QAnon’s significant support for Trump in last year’s election and emphasized that the president wouldn’t have won without the movement’s followers backing him.
Registered voters who believed QAnon conspiracy theories preferred Trump over then-Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of +61 (those who preferred the president minus those who preferred Harris) in a poll by nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute taken roughly two months before the election.
The same poll found registered voters who rejected or doubted such conspiracy theories preferred Harris over Trump by a margin of +16.
He then pointed to past polls indicating that registered GOP voters and GOP-leaning independents who picked Trump as their choice for the 2024 and 2016 Republican presidential nominee have sided mainly with conspiracy theories he has pushed over the years.
Trump performed better with such groups in last year’s election if they believed that Joe Biden’s 2020 election win wasn’t legit, per a CNN/SSRS poll from August 2023.
Enten argued that Trump pushing the theory to his supporters helped him “rise up from the dead” following his election loss that year and the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
Trump also notably fared better with such groups if they believed his racist “birther” conspiracy that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, according to a separate CNN/ORC International poll from September 2015.
