Trump is caught in an Epstein web of his own making

What happens when you spend decades seeding salacious stories about evil lurking in the halls of power, demanding evidence to prove basic truths, and questioning the veracity of that evidence once it’s presented? 

Donald Trump is finding out.

Over the last week, the president has been trying to fight his way out of a web of his own creation, as some of his truest followers in MAGA world call for the full release of the government’s investigative files concerning convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The outcry from Trump acolytes comes after the Department of Justice published a two-page memo earlier this month, stating that Epstein’s supposed “client list,” which Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said was on her desk, didn’t actually exist. 

Following a weeklong uproar from both the left and right, Trump finally called on a federal court judge to unseal the grand jury testimony related to Epstein’s case. The Justice Department has also subpoenaed Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving her own 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. But the moves have done little to quell the outrage from the right, particularly after House Speaker Mike Johnson sent the chamber into summer recess early this week to head off a vote on releasing the files. The move prompted fury from the party’s MAGA wing. “Crimes have been committed,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told reporters. “If there’s no justice and no accountability, people are going to get sick of it.”

As all this has played out, Trump has cast about for someone to blame, pointing the finger at Democrats and his “PAST supporters” for stoking the scandal. In truth, it’s Trump who is uniquely responsible for cultivating the culture of conspiracy in which he’s now floundering.

Credit where it’s due: Trump’s long and well-documented history of conspiracy-mongering has been perhaps one of his greatest skills and has almost always worked out in his favor. His constant questioning of President Obama’s birthplace was so successful that it transformed Trump, then a reality star and real estate mogul, into a cable news fixture. Later on, his success at convincing nearly three-quarters of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen played no small role in securing his 2024 election victory. 

Even the speculation about which other A-listers were in Epstein’s orbit were often fair game for Trump. In 2019, Trump fed rumors that the Clintons were somehow involved in Epstein’s death by suicide in prison. “Did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question,” Trump said at the time. Nevermind that Trump and Epstein were close friends or that he once told New York magazine that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump is a devoted student of the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” school of politics—and for the most part, it’s worked.

But now it’s Trump who’s found himself stuck to Epstein, and he has no one to blame but himself. After all, it was Trump who taught his followers not to trust the abridged version of a story (see: Trump’s campaign to secure Obama’s long-form birth certificate in 2011). Now, it stands to reason those same people want more than a two-page summary of the DOJ’s Epstein investigation. 

And it was Trump who convinced a certain subset of the American electorate to scour video evidence for alleged election night aberrations in 2020. Is it any wonder they’re now spiraling over the missing minute (or minutes, according to Wired) in the video footage the government released of the night Epstein died? 

Meanwhile, the stories linking Trump to Epstein just keep growing. On Monday, The New York Times reported that one of Epstein’s accusers encouraged the FBI to look into Trump as early as 1996. And The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump once sent Epstein a lewd birthday card, featuring a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman and allusions to their shared secrets. The Journal reported that the card is among the documents DOJ officials reviewed as part of the Epstein investigation. Trump has denied the story, calling the article “fake news” and has since sued the Journal for defamation. 

That controversy prompted some conservatives who’d been critical of the Trump administration’s approach to Epstein to leap to the president’s defense. But that reprieve may be short-lived. As one Trump ally, Mike Benz, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast over the weekend, “You trained us to go after this issue.” 

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