Attorney General Pam Bondi took to X over the weekend with a bold statement: "President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in American history."
Her post was about efforts to release documents concerning the attempted assassination of Trump last July.
But the folks commenting in the replies had a completely different investigation in mind – the one into Jeffrey Epstein.
And they weren't buying it.
"Liar," snapped several people – along with many much harsher insults. One conservative YouTuber who mixes blistering tirades with Bitcoin promotions wrote: "I will vote for whatever President ... campaigns on arresting Pam Bondi over the cover up of the Epstein Files."
After folding into his coalition many non-traditional voters from the more fringe corners of the internet, Trump and members of his administration now find themselves coming face to face with the conspiratorial thinking they have stoked.
"This is the greatest cover-up by a president and for a president in history," said one member of a Facebook group devoted to sleuthing about the case. "Epstein is the story and don't let up."
At issue isn't so much the previously unreleased pictures of people like Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson and legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite in Epstein's company – which is not an indicator of any wrongdoing – but the sea of blacked-out redactions in the files themselves.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump suggested that he would support the release of investigation files. In February, Bondi said they were "sitting on my desk right now to review".
But after so much time and anticipation, Friday's release landed with a whimper.
Joe Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, says Trump's coalition is now more about scepticism and antagonism towards institutions - and less about traditional Republican Party goals.
Many in the movement, he says, believe that huge numbers of children are being used for sex trafficking, beliefs that are bolstered by Epstein's very real crimes as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon.
"People don't necessarily want documents released - they want documents released which tell them that what they believe is true."
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