The Epstein conspiracy has unmasked Trump as a faux-populist
Conspiracy theories are not a bite-sized hors d'oeuvre in Maga world; they are the main course. That it was the Jeffrey Epstein scandal – not cuts to healthcare, lower taxes on the rich, or a bombing raid on Iran – that unmasked Trump to some of his followers as a faux populist and member of the elite shows that these theories are the pistons powering the movement.
The reason is that conspiracy theories substitute the material for the symbolic. They can serve as allegories for real injustices. The hardcore Maga base elected Trump to reveal the corrupt cabal that was tricking America into decadent decline. He was the captain of their resistance. 'Trump's return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis [unveiling] of the ancien régime's secrets,' Peter Thiel wrote hopefully before the inauguration.
But then Trump told them to shut up. Trump overruled Attorney General Pam Bondi's promise to release the files on Epstein. He told his followers not to 'waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about'. He wanted them to look the other way. Their crusader for truth was telling them all to go back home.
Parts of his online fanbase now whisper that perhaps Trump himself is in the Epstein files. For that to be the case, Trump would have had to have made a reckless bet: that he could talk up the conspiracy for years in order to sully his rivals – such as fellow Epstein associate Bill Clinton – without his own role ever coming out. It would be kamikaze politics if it weren't so self-serving.
Trump might lose his bet. For the first time, the president and his online gang are looking at each other across the dinner table with faces shadowed by betrayal. Trump barters myths in exchange for votes. He got the Resolute Desk; his base got a Manichean world-view that split society into good and bad, the Elite and the People. But, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the final months of the Soviet Union, he let loose forces that might, if not presage his downfall, then at least become impossible to control. Call it Perestroika for paedophiles.
Why is it the Epstein files, and not countless other conspiracies, that have caused Trump such grief? Because there are many real questions about Epstein that anyone interested in justice for the victims of one of the most infamous sexual predators of the century should want answers to.
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Where did his fortune come from, for instance? Why was the metadata of the surveillance video outside the cell where he supposedly killed himself tampered with? Why was he left alone when his jailers knew he was a suicide risk? Why did the prosecutor, who went on to become Trump's labour secretary, give Epstein such a lenient sentence when he was first arrested in 2006?
These questions could give the Epstein story the legs to unbalance Trump for the remainder of his term. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published extracts that it claimed were from a birthday letter that Trump wrote to Epstein in 2003, complete with a lewd drawing and the message 'Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.' Now Trump is suing the paper and its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, for $10bn.
The two billionaires have gracelessly pirouetted around each other for decades. In 1992 Trump might have flicked to page six of the New York Post to read stories about his divorce from Ivana. Back in 2016 when News Corp executives would parse his tweets like a daily horoscope, Murdoch weighed in after reports that Trump was irritated by an unflattering WSJ poll. 'Time to calm down,' Murdoch posted, when he still used Twitter. 'If I [am] running anti-Trump conspiracy then [I'm] doing [a] lousy job!'
Days before the WSJ story hit, Murdoch was spotted in Trump's box at the Fifa Club World Cup. It was a reminder of Trump's years spent inside the media elite, as a cartoon figure who Murdoch's papers eagerly saw as a willing collaborator. Their meeting marked Trump out as a man from a previous age, a tribune of the people with friends in high places: something his successors will note to avoid.
Murdoch was once considered the great Satan of high-class liberalism. Trump knocked him off that perch. But the president now has enemies to his right. There is a hinterland beyond Trump far more extreme than the president himself. At one event at a conservative conference in February, diehard Trump fans who had come from around the country were asked to raise their hands if they still watched Fox News. In a crowd of hundreds, I saw one or two hands go up. They were met with a few derisive laughs. These Trump followers preferred more conspiratorial channels such as NewsNation and Real America's Voice.
The Epstein saga roils Washington as its wiser residents flee the seasonal heat. In the sunlight, the city's rats lie inert on the pavements from the sauna-like temperatures. Trump was sent to drain the swamp, but some in his movement are now asking whether he always quite liked the grime.
[See more: Why do right-wing 'transvestigators' believe Michelle Obama is a man?]
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