Opinion: Can the Jeffrey Epstein saga puncture Trump's balloon?

Mint

26-07-2025

Over the last decade there have been so many occasions when anyone even with a mild interest in political narrative has thought: wouldn't it be funny if this is the thing that brings US President Donald Trump down. The strange thing about Trump is that it's hard to gauge at any time if he is down or up. His ups have all the aesthetics of downs and his downs have all the convictions of ups. And in this anti-gravity, definitively anti-gravitas Trumpy trumpery-filled decade, you have wondered what would definitively puncture that balloon. Did anyone ever think it might be—even for the briefest time—Jeffrey Epstein?
A stream of anti-elitist lava brought Trump to power, the kind of lava that once promised to bring Swiss black money straight to our bank accounts. And as thoughtful commentators have pointed out that same anti-elitist, conspiracy theory loving wave found in the real-life figure of American financier and convicted sex offender Epstein the perfecvillain. And Epstein's last gift to every conspiracy theory loving American nut was a sudden death in prison. Almost his last gift, I should say because the real gift was the certainty that in his diaries would be the name of every last person that the quintessential Trump supporter hated. And now Trump is in the kind of situation that powered really excellent, old-fashioned dramas—the horns of a dilemma. He has to either risk releasing millions of pages of material in which he, Trump, a close friend of Villain #1 is sure to appear, however innocently. Or he continues to not release it, further fuelling the rage of his blood-thirsty fans. I watched a video of a Trump fan asking with seemingly the greatest sincerity, 'why is Trump not releasing the papers? What could be stopping him?" True love. This is what it looks like.
Of course, there is a bitter irony in that a man who has been found liable of sexual abuse in court and has been credibly accused of much, much sexual misconduct finds his throne wobbly because of his supporters' fixation on a completely different billionaire. When Trump in the last week or two called his voters stupid and said Epstein is boring, it is almost as if he is saying: what does that old creep have that I don't? He is almost singing that Mika line (from the song Grace Kelly): Why don't you like me, why don't you like me, without making me try? Almost but not quite.
I am currently reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger and that makes me think often about Trump and Epstein. Partly because of the idea of the destabilising twin that animates her book (short version: Naomi Klein, a serious political writer is confused all over the world with her contemporary writer Naomi Wolf, who was also once sincere but has since become…very nutty. This has made Naomi Klein's life and work very difficult. Eventually, she wrote this incredibly complex, very entertaining book about pettiness and big ideas and conspiracy theories). That the evil twin will slowly consume and take over the life of the original seems to be a given in the mythology of the doppelganger. So here was Trump who was close friends with Epstein by all accounts and once recounted their similarities in a now infamous euphemism—that they liked beautiful women. Then his supporters who are aatmanirbhar (self-reliant) if nothing else, made up a whole epic in which Trump was going to cleanse the world of evil sex traffickers who drank the blood of children to stay young. Unfortunately, they picked his double. And Trump, who when he was not in power, only cautiously partook of the bloodlust for the Epstein papers still partook. And because he partook is now finding the guillotine sharpened by his devotees glinting in his peripheral vision. The double rising from the grave.
The remarkable thing about Naomi Klein's book is that she writes about the pure irritation of being confused with a conspiracy theory lover all the time as interestingly as she writes about seeing the victory of the evil twin version of ideas. Here is one example among many. When Klein (among others) argued that the whole world could have easily have had free covid vaccination if not for the greed of corporations, her doppelganger argued that governments and other evil cabals are vaccinating us to make us slaves. A similar kind of evil twin version prevails in the fixation on the crimes against children by a dead billionaire and his pals when several live American billionaires and their cabals are committing crimes against the children of the world everyday. And they make their pronouncements about children in poverty, queer children, Palestinian children, immigrant children, black children and girl children everyday. And this does not seem to animate the Epstein diary hunters in the least. And that is what happens when you confuse the messy, thin, barely satisfying feeling of justice in the real world with the rich, mouthfeel of a television climax. Seeing double makes your eyes blur.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.