Donald Trump’s political obituary has been written more times than anyone could hope to count without the resources of a large data processing center. The “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, impeachments in 2019 and 2021, the specter of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, a conviction on felony crimes last year: In these and many other instances, reports of Mr. Trump’s political demise have been greatly, perhaps even desperately, exaggerated.
Now we are being told that Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-deflating about-face on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein — the financier and sexual predator whose suicide in jail and supposed client list Mr. Trump now dismisses as “pretty boring stuff” — presents a grave threat to his support.
I think this is rather unlikely. Give it a week or a month or a year, and I suspect that all of it, including any unsealed grand jury transcripts, will be forgotten by nearly everyone except his political opponents.
There are two popular misconceptions about the sort of conspiracy theories that swirl around the MAGA movement, both of which lead people to overestimate the risk Mr. Trump is taking in backing away from these narratives. One mistake is thinking that such theories are the exclusive province of flat-earth kooks, rather than a default rhetorical tool of any political opposition.
Critics of Bill Clinton accused him of smuggling cocaine through an Arkansas airport when he was governor of the state and insinuated that he and his wife were involved in the death of the White House aide Vince Foster. Opponents of George W. Bush claimed that he stole the 2004 election with the help of rigged electronic voting machines and that he invaded Iraq to benefit Halliburton, the oil services company for which Dick Cheney had served as chief executive. Barack Obama was said to be a Kenyan by birth and ineligible for the presidency. To many of Mr. Trump’s detractors during his first term, he was a Kremlin asset.
Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or insane but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth, for expressing aspirations, anxieties and feelings of hopelessness in the face of vast structural forces that would otherwise resist deliberation. In the case of Mr. Epstein, these theories — that he used his sex ring to blackmail politicians and other powerful people, that he was an Israeli intelligence operative — reflect a widely shared sense of elite betrayal and institutional inertia. For many Americans, such stories have far more explanatory power than, say, a primer on neoliberalism by Wolfgang Streeck.
Our public life is hopelessly saturated with these displaced “truths,” but they are more like useful metaphors than factual claims. As a result — and this is the second overlooked feature of conspiracy theories — they can lose their utility and their salience once their purveyors or those who benefit from their dissemination obtain power. They are frictionless fictions, and they can be readily discarded, often without major political cost.
Most Democrats, for example, did not really believe that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent, and they stopped indulging that fantasy once Joe Biden was in power. They were sophisticated enough to understand, at least implicitly, that such stories are a shorthand for the ill-defined malfeasance of their real or perceived enemies.
Even for the handful of true believers who cling tightly to conspiracy theories — and the MAGA movement may overindex here — their thinking is endlessly malleable. When your convictions are invulnerable to falsification, signs are always taken for wonders. In some circles, Mr. Trump’s very disavowal of the Epstein theory will become evidence not of his betrayal but that he is somehow pursuing the guilty more assiduously than ever. “They” may have gotten to him for now, but you can be sure he is playing a deeper game.
For his part, Mr. Trump seems to agree that conspiracy theories are not for the victorious. When he relegates the “Epstein hoax” to the territory of the “lunatic left” and calls its theorists “losers” and “past supporters,” what he suggests is that these ideas are for those out of power — Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently engaged in some Epstein theorizing of her own — and that winners like him have better things to do.
The ancient riddle of MAGA is whether Mr. Trump is the head of a genuine populist movement or the object of a personality cult. The fact that Mr. Trump, despite his dismissiveness this month about the Epstein story, now feels compelled to release grand jury testimony and other documents suggests that he is at least somewhat beholden to democratic forces beyond his control.
But the halfheartedness of his acquiescence is instructive. This is the closest he has ever come to a betrayal — waffling on a cherished myth — despite repeatedly failing to deliver on so much of his supposedly radical political program. I do not think the Epstein affair is an inflection point capable of answering the MAGA riddle definitively. But it does show us how frighteningly thin the border has become between politics and performance.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.
The post Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn’t Going to Hurt Trump appeared first on New York Times.
