Trump’s ghost of Epstein past

There must be a fable that captures Maga’s conspiratorial arc. For years, Maga’s leading influencers alleged that Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment were withholding Jeffrey Epstein’s master list of fellow abusers of underage girls.

Four such conspiracy theorists then got big jobs — JD Vance as vice-president, Pam Bondi as attorney-general, Kash Patel as FBI director and Dan Bongino as his deputy. Finally, Maga truth tellers had the power to blow the Epstein conspiracy apart. The same people now tell us there was no “clients list” after all. Nor was there any evidence that Epstein was murdered in jail (still less by the Clintons). He took his own life, Bondi and Patel concluded in their DoJ-FBI memo last weekend. Are we still talking about that “creep” Epstein? Trump asked on Tuesday. Even to raise the topic was a “desecration” of the memory of the Texas flood victims. This was Trump asking Maga to drop the subject of Epstein. 

Let me make two seemingly contradictory observations. Trump’s base was for years fed a diet of nonsense about a deep state conspiracy to protect sexually abusive liberals. It went along with other dark fantasies, such as the Comet Pizza blood-drinking paedophile ring and the stolen 2020 election. Second, America deserves a non-partisan investigation into how and why a serial abuser like Epstein could have operated so freely over more than three decades. Epstein’s social circle, and those who flew on his “Lolita Express” to his infamous private Caribbean island, knew no partisan or professional boundaries. They spanned a former president, a current president, the son (now brother) of Britain’s monarch, a former governor, a tech billionaire, a senator, prominent lawyers and others. 

Most have wisely avoided saying anything in public on Epstein. Some, such as Prince Andrew, might regret having done so. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, who represented Epstein and hung out with him a lot, told NPR that there was no way anyone could have known about the man’s saturnalian habits. Yet by all accounts, Epstein’s posse of adolescent girls were there for guests to see. It seems the moral to this story is to let sleeping dogs lie. I doubt there are many public attorneys or FBI agents with the gumption to cast a probe as wide as this one should go. 

The other moral to the Epstein story is that money has no colour. Epstein was a billionaire. Fundraisers at Harvard and other institutions naturally sought his benefaction. They were not incentivised to probe his criminal record. We know that a few of his acquaintances shared his taste for teen girls. We also know that he was given an absurdly generous plea bargain in 2008 by Alex Acosta, Southern Florida’s then US attorney. Acosta became Trump’s first term labour secretary. Having served a 13-month sentence in Florida in which he was allowed to come and go, Epstein resumed his abusive patterns from his New York residence. 

We know much of this only because of the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown’s stunning 2018 investigative series on Epstein’s non-prosecution deals and his continued trafficking and abuse of underage girls. To underline, it was the legacy media that blew this open. As a parasite to its host, Maga fed on that corpus of professional reporting for its own ends. The Herald’s reporting triggered a new criminal investigation into Epstein. A few weeks after he was arrested in 2019, he took his own life. 

In another universe, the scales would now be falling from Maga’s eyes. Trump’s base would realise that for all these years they have been taken for a ride. In the universe that we do inhabit, Trump is betting on Maga’s gullibility.

Shortly after the release of Bondi’s bathetic Epstein memo, the DOJ launched probes into John Brennan and James Comey, the former CIA and FBI directors who Trump believes helped spawn the 2017 “Russia hoax”. That alleged mother-of-all fake news stories has already been investigated by the Trump-appointed special counsel, John Durham. Brennan and Comey both emerged unscathed from Durham’s three-year investigation. Trump is nevertheless putting his chips on Maga’s amnesia. “Look this way, dummies,” Trump seems to be saying. “The deep state’s over here.”

I am turning this week to my excellent colleague Lauren Fedor, who recently came back from parental leave. Lauren, I’m sorry to welcome you back with such a fraught question: Is Maga as gullible as Trump clearly believes it is? Part of me thinks that the Epstein memo could be a watershed for some of the Maga crowd. Then I remember all that has happened over the past decade. What’s your instinct? Also, how politically significant was Elon Musk’s fissile recent tweet alleging that Trump had not released the “Epstein files” because his name appeared on them? As crude threats go, this one is hard to shake.

 Recommended reading

• My column this week looked at Trump’s ominous ICE security state. His “big beautiful bill” catapults immigration spending into the Praetorian stratosphere while further paring America’s thin social safety net. 

• My colleague, Martin Wolf, writes with demoralising precision about the UK’s self-induced economic malaise. The UK has been ruled by a mix of charlatans and timid people, Martin argues. Keir Starmer is an honourable yet woeful example of the latter. 

• Swampians interested in Zbig, my Brzezinski biography, might like to read this stellar review in the Washington Post by Jonathan Tepperman: “‘Zbig’ is a pleasure to read, written in the same plain-spoken, lucid prose as Luce’s columns,” he wrote. There was also a great review in the Economist.

• Finally, do read this startling Atlantic essay by Matteo Wong about how AI is radicalising. Do you remember the days when Sam Altman warned about the dangers of singularity? I do, though only vaguely. Having gambled Croesus-level sums on AI, Silicon Valley’s titans are now promising a golden age.

Lauren Fedor replies

Ed, thanks for asking me to weigh in on this issue, which has proven to be a thorn in the side of the administration in the last couple of days. The whole saga seems to fly in the face of the White House’s mantra, “promises made, promises kept”, doesn’t it?

Given the president and his allies’ long-standing fixation with Epstein, it is no wonder that some of the loudest voices in Maga world — including Tucker Carlson, Laura Loomer and your recent lunch companion Steve Bannon — have lashed out at the administration’s attempts to turn the page.

But, as you suggest, I don’t expect the Maga movement to turn on Trump over this. The base has stood by the president despite countless U-turns over the years, and I see little reason why this time would be different.

The same cannot be said for attorney-general Pam Bondi. She has become the top target of ire from the Maga faithful, who accuse her of overpromising and underdelivering. The longtime Trump defender is now haunted by a February appearance on Fox News, when she was asked about a list of Epstein’s clients, and replied: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

If Trump wants to protect Bondi, he could shift the blame entirely to another old foe: Joe Biden. Tim Burchett, the Republican congressman from Tennessee, appeared to be testing out this strategy on Wednesday, when he told News Nation that he thought the “client list” had existed — but it was destroyed under the last administration.

As for Elon Musk, I have no idea whether his incendiary accusations — sent a few weeks ago, in the throes of the very public breakdown in his relationship with Trump — have any truth to them.

But it seems like the billionaire is not giving up on chipping away at the president. Just this week — days after he said he had formed a new political party — Musk asked on X: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” Musk may prove to be a longer-running political problem for the president than Epstein.

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