Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn't Going to Hurt Trump

New York Times

20-07-2025

Donald Trump's political obituary has been written more times than anyone could hope to count without the resources of a large data processing center. The 'Access Hollywood' tape in 2016, impeachments in 2019 and 2021, the specter of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, a conviction on felony crimes last year: In these and many other instances, reports of Mr. Trump's political demise have been greatly, perhaps even desperately, exaggerated.
Now we are being told that Mr. Trump's conspiracy-deflating about-face on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein — the financier and sexual predator whose suicide in jail and supposed client list Mr. Trump now dismisses as 'pretty boring stuff' — presents a grave threat to his support.
I think this is rather unlikely. Give it a week or a month or a year, and I suspect that all of it, including any unsealed grand jury transcripts, will be forgotten by nearly everyone except his political opponents.
There are two popular misconceptions about the sort of conspiracy theories that swirl around the MAGA movement, both of which lead people to overestimate the risk Mr. Trump is taking in backing away from these narratives. One mistake is thinking that such theories are the exclusive province of flat-earth kooks, rather than a default rhetorical tool of any political opposition.
Critics of Bill Clinton accused him of smuggling cocaine through an Arkansas airport when he was governor of the state and insinuated that he and his wife were involved in the death of the White House aide Vince Foster. Opponents of George W. Bush claimed that he stole the 2004 election with the help of rigged electronic voting machines and that he invaded Iraq to benefit Halliburton, the oil services company for which Dick Cheney had served as chief executive. Barack Obama was said to be a Kenyan by birth and ineligible for the presidency. To many of Mr. Trump's detractors during his first term, he was a Kremlin asset.
Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or insane but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth, for expressing aspirations, anxieties and feelings of hopelessness in the face of vast structural forces that would otherwise resist deliberation. In the case of Mr. Epstein, these theories — that he used his sex ring to blackmail politicians and other powerful people, that he was an Israeli intelligence operative — reflect a widely shared sense of elite betrayal and institutional inertia. For many Americans, such stories have far more explanatory power than, say, a primer on neoliberalism by Wolfgang Streeck.
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