24.07.2025
Desperation and delusion
Trump is determined to put the genie back in the bottle. He fed the conspiracy theory around Jeffrey Epstein, now it is the turn of the Democrats. Eddie Ford urges the left not to get sucked in
In a hole of Donald Trump’s own making, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives announced that they would call it quits and head home a day early for the annual five-week summer recess. In this way, it seems, they hoped to circumvent desperate Democratic Party efforts to force a vote on the release of the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files - like repeatedly attaching amendments to totally unrelated legislation, so that Republicans felt compelled to vote them down.
Of course, this just fuels conspiracy theories across the board - what are they trying to cover up? At a press conference defending the decision to cut short the session, house speaker Mike Johnson said that Congress must be careful in calling for the release of documents related to the case for fear of “retraumatising” his victims, arguing that “there’s no purpose for Congress to push an administration to do something that they’re already doing”.
He meant that Trump has directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony in the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents - the president citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity” given to his former friend and New York financier, who officially died from suicide in his jail cell in 2019.
But Tucker Carlson, who acted as a gateway drug for generally crazy and far-right ideas on his Fox talk show and then podcasts - stressing that he “loves personally” Donald Trump and has campaigned “with and for the president” - has severely criticised the White House’s dismissive attitude to the Epstein story. He has compared it to what he describes as the ‘sneering liberal establishment’ that Trump campaigned against, saying the left would dismiss critics “out of hand” as “not worth listening to” - now the Trump administration was doing the same, he argued.1 For him that is really at the heart of why “the Epstein thing is so distressing”: the fact that the US government he voted for has “refused to take my question seriously”.
The story took a turn last week when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump contributed to a “bawdy” winking letter, including a doodle of a nude woman, to a sort of Festschrift that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend, had compiled in 2003 for his 50th birthday - which Trump has totally denied and is now suing for libel. And then an artist, Maria Farmer, who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago, has told The New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials back then to investigate powerful people in their orbit - including a person “worthy of attention”, Donald Trump, because of an “unsettling” encounter with him late one night in 1995 in Epstein’s offices.
Typically, having a gut instinct about how to frame a story, he is trying to turn these developments to his favour - as evidence of a media smear campaign against him by the forces of the establishment. Yet it is an open question as to whether that will be enough to satisfy Tucker Carlson and some within his Maga base. Yet, as we saw with the bombing of Iran, which seemed to contradict his ‘America first’ principles of not getting involved in oversea wars over countries about which we know very little, they were never going anywhere else - as Trump is well aware. Elon Musk’s proposed America Party is a non-starter, especially as many within the Maga firmament, like Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro, regard him as despicable, “illegal” immigrant and globalist. They will stick with Donald.
Conspiracy
If you live by the sword, you die by the sword - or at least, get caught up in a backlash which is difficult to contain. The Epstein conspiracy, to use a term, is something that has been fed by Trump to his base, along with other theories to foster a cult around himself - which we can see on full display at his political rallies and the eco-system of social media, talk shows, podcasts, etc. Many of Trump’s fervent supporters believe that Epstein was killed, so that he could not reveal a “client list” implicating other powerful men.
Trump has fanned the theory, of course, by insinuating that the Clintons were linked to Epstein’s death and some of the president’s own officials had promoted such expectations, including Pam Bondi herself, who only in February told Fox News that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. Kash Patel, before he became the actual director of the FBI, claimed that the agency was keeping Epstein’s “black list”; and the charming Donald Trump junior, one of the president’s five children, accused the Biden administration of keeping the list secret to protect paedophiles - JD Vance made similar claims.
Deep state
As one prominent journalist has noted, Epstein has “become the Ark of the Covenant in the cosmology of rightwing conspiracies”, which will reveal the ultimate secrets of deep state paedophiles and other nefarious activities.2 A poll in 2021 found that about a quarter of Republicans believed that “the government, media and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles, who run a global child-sex-trafficking operation”. In that sense, the Epstein files were an easy road to travel from ‘Pizzagate’ (the QAnon predecessor conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats held child sex slaves in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong Washington pizza parlour) - hence a leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for paedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse.
In 2020 an NBC journalist described QAnon as “this theory that Democrats are a satanic paedophile ring and that you are the saviour of that” - to which Trump replied, after saying several times that he did not know about it, “they are very strongly against paedophilia” and “I agree with that”.3 And, of course, apart from their ideological use, the ever-changing conspiracy theories have been turned into a reliable cash cow by various rightwing media - the classic example being the unhinged Alex Jones and his Infowars website, which sells a vast array of merchandise.
However, the truth is a lot more prosaic. The term, ‘Epstein list’, or ‘Epstein files’, has become conflated, sometimes intentionally by both his supporters and detractors, with a supposed ‘client list’ - even though the US Department of Justice and the FBI jointly concluded that there was no such list. A DoJ memo from July this year stated that there was “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions, and indeed the services he provided were less remarkable than people had made out. The court documents and flight logs, some of which have been publicly released. have already named various prominent individuals as having travelled with Epstein, or been in contact with him - no deeply held secret. Others mentioned in the ‘Epstein files’ include Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Michael Jackson and Stephen Hawking - not all partners in crime with Jeffrey Epstein (unless you believe that the conspiracy is on a truly vast and sinister scale!).
But now Trump is struggling to put the genie back in the bottle, especially as it is on record that he and Epstein had been close friends, if not part of a mutual admiration society. As the president said in a 2002 interview, Epstein was “a terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with”, and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”, while Epstein described himself as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years” - which is only to be expected, as he cultivated an elite social circle that included numerous politicians and celebrities. Touching upon a truth, in a post on Truth Social, the president declared that, even if the court gave its “full and unwavering support” in releasing all the court documents and files on Epstein, “nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request”.
It is certainly the case that Trump’s grooming of his followers cannot be completely undone like Frankenstein’s monster, but it is equally the case that the Democrats, or ‘the left’ in America, have regularly engaged in conspiracism of their own - arguably on a par with the theories of Maga or QAnon lunatics, because it is so cynically self-serving. This was shown by the fact that Jamie Raskin and 15 other House Democrats signed a letter to Pam Bondi, accusing her of withholding documents, so as to protect Trump from potentially damaging disclosures. They cited Elon Musk’s earlier post to X accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files” - as if this was anything unusual or sinister, as very many others were mentioned in the documents, given the deceased man’s extensive social circles.4
Clearly the Democrats thought they could get political advantage out of making such dark insinuations linking Epstein’s crimes to the name of Donald Trump - but that all came to a temporary end when Mike Johnson put the house into recess.
Manchurian
Clearly this is a story of desperation and delusion, with people believing what they want to believe and that the truth can go to hell. While anything is possible, as with JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, the most likely explanation is that provided by the authorities - Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while in his cell, as he would have known the terrible fate that awaited him because of the prison regime and the treatment he would receive from fellow inmates. But in the case of the Democrats, we have been there before - remember the Steele Dossier?5
Published in 2017, it was compiled about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign the year before by counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele, presented as an unfinished 35-page compilation of “unverified and potentially unverifiable” memos that were considered by Steele to be “raw intelligence - not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation”. Full of urinating prostitutes and “pee tape” rumours, this implausible document essentially portrayed Trump as a Manchurian candidate - outlining a “well developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Moscow allegedly supported and assisted Trump for at least five years”, dating back to the time when he was the host of The Apprentice, and handed him “a flow of intelligence”, including on “political rivals”. Furthermore, it claimed that Vladimir Putin personally ordered a Russian election interference operation codenamed Project Lakhta and actually installed Trump in the White House - all of which the Democrats eagerly lapped up. In other words, they peddled a xenophobic, McCarthyite conspiracy theory of their own, but slightly more believable, simply because it did not involve drinking the adrenochrome-rich blood of children in a Satanic ritual under a pizzeria.
These allegations continued to regularly resurface, implying that Putin somehow had a ‘hold’ over Trump, particularly after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022 - suggesting that the US president was a Russian asset or a ‘patsy’ for the Kremlin, rather than the more straightforward explanation that he was trying to reverse the decline of US imperialism by ditching long-established foreign policy objectives and practices. Perhaps that is succeeding - witness the way European leaders are scrambling to pay tribute to US imperialism by agreeing to ramp up war/defence spending to 5% on Nato, which Trump has described as a “big win”.