Over the last squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent base. They’ve been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even when she was put in ICE detention. “I will support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America great again.”
So it’s been fascinating to watch a vocal part of Trump’s movement revolt over his administration’s handling of files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex-trafficking financier who died in jail in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. Running for president, Trump promised to release the Epstein files, which some thought would contain evidence of murder. “Yet another good reason to vote for Trump,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, wrote on social media. “Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
Some of the influencers who now staff Trump’s administration built their followings by spinning wild stories about the case, promising revelations that would lay their enemies low. Epstein’s client list “is going to rock the political world,” Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the F.B.I., said in September. Appearing on Fox News in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked whether her department would release “a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.” She responded, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Now she says there was no such client list. Last week, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. released a memo saying that Epstein killed himself and no more information would be forthcoming: “It is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” Trump has implored his followers to forget about Epstein, writing, in a petulant Truth Social post, that the files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary” and various other deep state foes. Let’s “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote.
But he was wrong: Lots of people care. Trump’s followers responded to his attempt to wave Epstein away with uncharacteristic fury and disappointment. Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign over Bondi’s handling of the case. Epstein was a major subject at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, a conservative conference that began on Friday. Speaking from the stage in Tampa, Fla., the comedian Dave Smith accused Trump of actively covering up “a giant child rapist ring.” The audience cheered and applauded.
Having nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in danger of being consumed by one. In many ways it’s delicious to watch, but there’s also reason for anxiety, because for some in Trump’s movement, this setback is simply proof that they’re up against a conspiracy more powerful than they’d ever imagined. “What we just learned is that dealing with the Epstein Operation is above the President’s pay grade,” posted Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and podcaster. An important question, going forward, is who they decide is pulling the strings.
Epstein obsessives are right to be suspicious about the weird turns the case has taken. So much about it feels inexplicable, including the sweetheart plea deal Epstein got in 2008, and the fact that he was apparently able to kill himself despite being one of the most monitored inmates in the country. Even if it turns out that a review of the case doesn’t implicate anyone who hasn’t already been charged, it should be a scandal that Bondi misled the public about the existence of a client list.
But the administration lies all the time — that alone doesn’t explain why this issue has so tested the MAGA coalition. To understand why it’s such a crisis, you need to understand the crucial role that Epstein plays in the mythologies buttressing MAGA. The case is of equal interest to QAnon types, who see in Epstein’s crimes proof of their conviction that networks of elite pedophiles have hijacked America, and of right-wing critics of Israel, who are convinced that Epstein worked for the Mossad, the country’s spy service.
Trumpism has always been premised on the idea that he’s warring against dark, even satanic globalist forces, and within the movement there’s a fierce yearning for the cathartic moment when those forces will be exposed and vanquished. The Epstein files were supposed to show the world, once and for all, the scale of the evil system that Trump’s voters believe he is fighting. “Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things,” Steve Bannon said at the Turning Point conference.
The way Trumpists have made this case a cause célèbre can seem bizarre to outsiders. After all, Trump’s friendship with the sex-trafficking financier has been widely documented. Epstein’s best-known victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club. And Trump has his own history of alleged creepiness around underage girls; several teenage contestants in one of his beauty pageants accused him of deliberately walking in on them when they were undressed. As Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said at a rally this weekend, “Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?”
But I’ve always seen the fantasy of Trump as a warrior against sex trafficking as a way for his followers to manage their cognitive dissonance about his obvious personal degeneracy. To believe that they are on the side of light while championing a man of such low character, Trump’s acolytes have had to conjure an enemy of vast and titanic evil, and invent a version of Trump that never existed.
Among those on the right who believe there’s an Epstein coverup, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself. That, after all, would require a re-evaluation of his integrity and their judgment. But they still take for granted that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful men and then blackmailing them, and that he was killed so he couldn’t talk. Now they have to figure out why Trump won’t give them the information they long for. The most logical explanation, said Tucker Carlson on his podcast last week, is “that intel services are at the very center of this story, U.S. and Israeli, and they’re being protected.”
This notion has become so widespread that Israel’s government tried to address it. “There is no evidence — none — that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of Israel,” wrote the Israeli minister Amichai Chikli in an open letter addressed to Turning Point’s head, Charlie Kirk. But Chikli couldn’t resist using the case against his more centrist political enemies, saying he wants to understand Epstein’s connection to “former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who both appear in previously published Epstein-related documents.”
This will not, I suspect, put theories about Epstein as a Zionist operative to bed. Without them, Trump’s followers would have to admit they were duped, that MAGA has never been a Manichaean battle against sex criminals, and Trump glommed onto the Epstein story only to help him win an election.
The entanglement of the Epstein drama with American debates about the Jewish state portends some dark developments. I won’t pretend to know whether Epstein ever worked for the Israelis, though I can’t imagine Trump covering for them at any cost to himself. I’m worried, however, about people blaming Jews for the strange and unresolvable parts of his sordid story. Scroll through X, and you’ll see they already are.
It’s worth recalling the origin of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” which was coined in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, an author of the book “When Prophecy Fails.” Festinger and his co-authors studied an apocalyptic U.F.O. cult, with an eye to what happened when the spaceship didn’t appear as predicted. Some members, disillusioned, left the group. Most, however, maintained or redoubled their commitment. The problem for Trump is that some of his followers need to choose between their commitment to him, and to the narrative that justified his rise.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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