4 days ago
Can Trump explain away Epstein scandal to MAGA supporters
Donald Trump has called the Epstein scandal 'bullshit', he called believers 'idiots' and 'selfish people" and urged supporters to forget about his former friend, but unlike many other scandals involving the US president, it just won't go away.
Mr Trump's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been the administration's biggest political problem to date.
The conspiracy theory around the disgraced financier and sexual predator, that the US President helped fuel, seemingly has turned around to bite him.
Many loyal Trump followers believe Epstein kept a list of hugely powerful people who had engaged in sex with women and underage girls that he trafficked.
The conspiracy suggests Epstein didn't take his own life but rather that these powerful people on the list had him killed before he could out them.
Believers have been calling for the release of this list for years, and when US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that the list was sitting on her desk, conspiracists broke into a fever.
But when Trump's Department of Justice announced last month that the list didn't exist, many lost faith.
There has been fierce criticism of Donald Trump, from some of his most fervent supporters for the first time, from QAnon influencers to conservative podcast hosts.
QAnon is a widely followed conspiracy theory purporting that a mysterious government insider called Q is leaking secrets to help Mr Trump battle the deep state and a cabal of powerful paedophiles including the likes of Hillary Clinton.
But the narrative that all the conspiracists have turned against their supposed saviour, isn't quite as clear cut as it has been made out.
Ciarán O'Connor, who researches conspiracy theories for think tank ISD Global said the belief in conspiracy theories is very hard to break.
'Conspiracy theories are elastic'
"Conspiracy theories are elastic, they're self-sealing and they're quite often impossible to disprove," he said.
"Especially to a base that is radicalised and so supportive and has been fed a diet of conspiracy fantasy plots over time by someone like President Trump".
But, Will Sommer, journalist with The Bullwark and author of 'Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America' says this feels different.
He says: "All of these other Trump scandals like, taking this plane from Qatar, things like that, they've sort of immunised the audience to not care about these ethical conflicts, but the difference being that with Epstein.
"I mean they, the right-wing media figures, people like Cash Patel, who's now in the administration.
"They all said like this is really, really, important. You should care a lot about this and then suddenly, Trump says: 'Shut up. Stop asking about it. You're you're an idiot if you believe this.'
"And so there has been this whiplash."
Mr O'Connor also sees the beginnings of a significant fracture.
"President Trump created a lot of MAGA content creators, and the promise to find out the truth about Epstein as their raison d'être," he says.
"So Epstein and allegations around him and trying to prove them kind of became a purity test for the MAGA base."
Some blips in conspiracies like the promise to arrest Hillary Clinton, that didn't happen can be explained away as part of a longer-term plan, but the Epstein list is so central to the whole conspiracy world, that it can't be just batted away.
"Donald Trump has tried distraction in recent weeks, by bringing up the Russia Hoax and suggesting that Obama could be arrested by posting a fake AI video of the former president being hauled off in cuffs from the Oval Office, but people have seen through the tactic and become even more enraged," says Mr O'Connor.
Much ire has been directed towards Kash Patel, director of the FBI and Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI, both of whom made their name as conspiracy theory peddlers whose central theme was the need to expose the Epstein list.
But now that they're in government they're towing the same line as previous administrations whom they labelled as the deep state that Donald Trump is supposedly battling.
Loyal followers like podcaster Andrew Shulz are turning against Mr Trump.
On his hugely successful show 'Flagrant' this week he said: "He put Bongino and Kash in there, which might be the stupidest thing in the history of the world.
"Why would you put the two guys that have non-stop pounded the pavement talking about how we're going to expose this Epstein thing, and the second they get in there like: 'You better shut the f*ck up."
'A line in the sand'
Even podcasting powerhouse Joe Rogan has called the Epstein issue 'a line in the sand'.
It seems the best media manipulator in all of politics fundamentally misreading the media landscape before him.
Mr Sommer says it's very unusual for Donald Trump to be so out of step with his base for even 24 hours, and now we've seen a whole month of it.
We know from reporting in the Wall Street Journal that Pam Bondi told the president that he's mentioned in the Epstein files, not necessarily in a criminal way, but it certainly could be embarrassing for him.
"It seems he's acting in a way that that seems so unlike him but that he's sort of protecting something larger or avoiding a bigger pain," says Sommer.
Yet such is the elasticity and strength of belief in the conspiracy that Mr O'Connor doesn't rule it out.
"MAGA influencers may well possibly find ways to find a comfortable through line between Trump's rejections that there is anything important in the Epstein client list, to the kind of drip, drip of further calls for investigations where Ghislaine Maxwell may come into it.
"Time will tell on that," he adds.
One of the explanations that is surfacing among right wing commentators and conspiracy theorists is that maybe Ghislaine Maxwell is innocent, and maybe she could come clean, exonerate Mr Trump and name the real culprits.
But Mr Sommer thinks this would be a difficult sell to the MAGA crowd, partly because it has happened so quickly.
With other scandals like 6 January, there was time to build a counter narrative and suggest that maybe the rioters were innocent, but this has been so abrupt, there's been no time to rehabilitate Ghislaine Maxwell for example
"To convince people that it's OK to pardon this sex offender, like a sex trafficker," he says. "It's not easy. It's the ultimate test of Trump's idea that that he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and get away with it."
And ultimately it will be Trump rather than any right-wing influencers that will have to do the convincing.
"Unlike anyone else in his administration or the wider MAGA media world, no one can really speak to the MAGA base quite like Trump," say Mr O'Connor.
Nobody expects hardcore MAGA supporters to suddenly vote for democrats, but they could become disillusioned and not vote, and independent voters could be swayed.
The Epstein files are likely to haunt the US President right up to next year's midterm elections and possibly beyond.
