Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
“The Epstein story mattered so much in MAGA circles because it was a key element in their indictment of America’s so-called ruling class,” New York Times opinion columnist David French wrote Monday.
That is why last week’s joint memo from the FBI and Justice Department denying the existence of an Epstein “list” and discouraging “unfounded” speculation was so disturbing to pro-Trump influencers.
Attorney General Pam Bondi handed out binders to social media influencers in February misleadingly labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Most of the records were already public, and evidently there will be no “Phase 2.”
Thus, some MAGA media power players now claim the Trump administration is trying to bury the truth.
It’s a stunning turn of events since conspiracy-theorizing has historically helped Trump enormously. His “birther” lie arguably birthed his political career and directly boosted his popularity with Republican voters. Conspiratorial claims about immigration and crime also helped him win the election the first time around.
Then “QAnon” emerged. The movement, which has been likened to a virtual cult, imagined that Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of Democrat child abusers.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, which has tracked the conspiracy theory’s popularity, some QAnon adherents believe that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
Epstein-related theories are an extension of that conspiratorial worldview, just as QAnon picked up where “Pizzagate” left off. (In 2016, the false theory about Hillary Clinton leading a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza shop led a North Carolina man to show up with a gun. He discovered that the restaurant didn’t even have a basement.)
Epstein is a complicated matter for Trump since the two men were described as friends decades ago. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with.” Trump later denounced Epstein and said he “threw him out” of Mar-a-Lago.
Trump is now increasingly the target of his base’s conspiratorial thinking — the same position he put Barack Obama in by baselessly questioning Obama’s birthplace more than a decade ago.
