Four days after JD Vance reportedly asked top Trump administration officials to come up with a new communications strategy for dealing with the scandal around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he appears to have put his foot in it, sparking a new round of online outrage even as he tried to defuse the furor.
In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Sunday, the vice-president tried to deflect criticism of the administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files by blaming Democrats. He accused Joe Biden of doing “absolutely nothing” about the scandal when he was in the White House.
“And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years,” he said. Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse multiple minor girls and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison during the Biden administration.
If Vance’s attempt to switch public blame onto Democrats was the big idea to emerge from his strategy meeting with attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel, which according to CNN he convened at the White House last week, then their labours appear to have backfired. (Vance denied to Fox that they had discussed Epstein at all, though he did acknowledge the meeting took place.)
Within minutes of the Fox News interview being broadcast, social media began to hum with renewed cries of “release the files!”
Clips of Vance smearing Democrats quickly began to circulate on X. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with leftwing politicians and leftwing billionaires … Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein island all the time. Who knows what they did,” he said. Vance also repeated Trump’s previously debunked claim that Bill Clinton had visited Epstein’s private island dozens of times. Clinton has acknowledged using Epstein’s jet, but denied ever visiting his island.
“Fine. Release all the files,” was the riposte from Bill Kristol, the prominent conservative Never Trumper who urged the documents to be made public with “no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates”.
Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s former head speechwriter, replied: “Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not. What are you afraid of, JD Vance?”
Favreau added that Trump’s name “is in the Epstein files”. That was an apparent reference to a report in the Wall Street Journal last month that a justice department review of the documents conducted under Bondi had found that the president’s name did appear “multiple times”.
Epstein died in August 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, while the financier and socialite was awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail; the death was ruled a suicide.
The White House has been caught in a bind over the Epstein affair which spawned conspiracy theories among many of Trump’s supporters, which now senior figures in the administration had actively encouraged during the 2024 campaign.
In July the justice department announced that there was no Epstein client list and that no more files would be made public, a decision that clashed with earlier statements from top Trump officials, including Bondi’s statement in February that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. The decision triggered an immediate and ongoing uproar that crossed the partisan political divide.
Among the most viral clips in the aftermath of that reversal was video of Vance himselftelling the podcaster Theo Von, two weeks before the election: “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list, that is an important thing.”
In his Fox News interview Vance also warned that “you’re going to see a lot of people get indicted” after Trump accused Obama of “treason” and called for his predecessor to be prosecuted.
The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has passed documents to the justice department that she claims show that the Obama administration maliciously tried to hurt Trump by linking Russian interference in the 2016 election to him.
Obama has dismissed Trump’s call for his prosecution as weak and ridiculous.
Several people advised Nixon just to burn the Watergate tapes. Looking back after he left office, Nixon concluded that the “lesson of Watergate” is “burn the tapes.”
From the perspective of Mango Mussolini, the least bad alternative for him would be to have a bonfire on the White House lawn and burn all the Epstein files. It would be a terrible alternative for him, but it would nevertheless be the least bad alternative for him.
Right now, he’s just flailing—bleating random bullshit and throwing spaghetti at the wall.
The two news articles are from this afternoon. The Chait opinion piece is from this morning.
So, here’s my top list of things I’d like to know.
I’d like to see the whole 2003 Epstein birthday book. By the way, someone almost surely has the original. Who has it, how can we get it, whose messages does it contain, and what do the messages say? (And if, perchance, the original has been misplaced, there are bound to be copies of the book.)
There are said to be thousands of pages of investigative files. Do those thousands of pages enlighten us about who, if anyone, other than Jeffrey and Ghislaine were using the girls? And, were there blackmail materials on these other people, if there were other people? Was blackmail being paid, and, if so, by whom?
And was Trump among the customers, assuming there were any customers? (The FBI, we are told, has had a host of minions examine the files, marking references to Trump. What kind of work product did the minions produce? Just lists of references to specific documents and pages? Annotated lists? Memos? How can we get the work product, and what will we learn from it?)
In advance of knowing these things, I would like to know why, if Trump is not as guilty as homemade sin, why he is acting as if he were as guilty as homemade sin. Like a guilty thing surprised.
Jonathan Chait would like to know these things, too. He writes,
Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.
Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that.
The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after TheWall Street Journalreportedthat Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men’s friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal—an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written “may every day be another wonderful secret” to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump’s well-documented penchant for doodling.
On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is “fake news,” that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch’s ethics rather than his own.
Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn’t) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent bipartisan Senate-committee investigation all concluded it had done).
Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama.
“I don’t really follow that too much,” he said of the Epstein matter. “It’s sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump has yet to specify why the “witch hunt” he’s been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new “witch hunt” he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address.
In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election. (“And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.”) You might think that this link would increase Trump’s curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time!
By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound moreworld-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump’s position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real). …
Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.
I was writing this post in my head when the Wall Street Journal served up this treat today at dinner time.
Donald Trump is, and has been for a long time, a bully, a liar, a con man, and a sociopath. Now he is something else as well—a doddering old fool. Whatever coherence his ramblings once had is disappearing fast. That said, one can construct something out of his disjointed utterings.
When Trump says that Thing X is a “hoax,” he means that
Thing X actually occurred or is now occurring, and that
Public knowledge about Thing X would reflect very badly on him—worse even than public knowledge that he routinely grabbed adult women by their genitalia, and bragged about this behavior.
I won’t regurgitate the whole sordid business. But it seems clear beyond peradventure of doubt that Trump is in the voluminous Epstein investigatory files, and that he is drenched in flop sweat.
To address this predicament, Trump now wants everyone to believe that Epstein was not in fact a pedophile; that he should not have been prosecuted (during Trump’s first administration) because Epstein did nothing wrong; and—by implication—that Epstein’s lover and co-conspirator, now in jail, did nothing wrong either; and that these wrongful prosecutions were the result of evil Democrats, just like the January 6 prosecutions.
To this end, Trump will cast James Comey’s daughter and career federal prosecutor, Maureen Comey, as chief villainess in the purportedly unjust prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That’s why he fired her yesterday.
From Team Trump’s perspective, firing Ms. Comey was a very bad idea.
As a former corporate advisor, I always told people to be careful about firing unsatisfactory employees who had dirt on you.
Firing Ms. Comey is mistake number 796. She has dirt on Trump.
Meanwhile, In Late Evening Developments
Trump says he is suing the Wall Street Journal, and all its corporate uncles, cousins, and aunts, for publishing the Epstein birthday letter.
It is widely reported that MAGA influencers—trying to play both ends against the middle—are asserting that the WSJ story about the birthday letter is fake news.
And Trump says he’s ordered the Justice Department to go to court to seek public disclosure of grand jury materials relating to Epstein.
I had already written this post in my mind before I read the Politico story, published about an hour ago.
Trump Has Scored a Famous Victory Over the MAGA Influencers. Or Has He?
Today, the talking heads are talking nonstop about how Trump seams to have beat the Epstein conspiracist MAGA influencers into submission—and how they’re singing a different tune from the one they sung on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday.
And whether or not Trump’s effort to tell his base to forget about Epstein will work or not.
The answer is that it all depends. It depends on whether the lunatic part of our American brethren and sistern will choose to believe Trump or whether they will choose to believe what they have believed about the pedophile ring coverup for the past decade. And a basement full of trafficked children in a Washington pizza restaurant that doesn’t have a basement.
That’s because the term “influencer” is inaccurate and misleading. The MAGA influencers don’t really influence. What they are good at spouting back to their listeners and viewers what their listeners and viewers want to hear.
As I would have said back when I was practicing antitrust law and relying on forensic microeconomists, the influencer competition for market share is fierce, the market is dynamic, and entry is easy. Just video yourself on your smartphone, post the video on YouTube, and start making money.
Given the market structure, given the incentives, and given the Zeitgeist, it is inevitable that some would-be influencers are going to come along spouting the theory that the pedophile ring has got to Trump and that he has gone over to the dark side.
I didn’t predict—though I should have predicted—that Nikki Haley would be among the first to stride across the stage in her high heels and begin the competition to sell alternative conspiracy theories.
Others will follow. Many others.
Game on. Now it’s up to the base to see which competing conspiracy appeals to their deformed, paranoid minds.
I don’t know whether people still read Orwell’s 1984. But I expect most of my readers know it. Remember what Winston Smith’s job was, at the Ministry of Truth?
This feels as if Trump is ordering the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history, and it’s not going so well.
One of the common misunderstandings about President Donald Trump is that he created the culture of conspiracy and surreality in which the American right is now immersed. He didn’t. He simply leveraged it.
This isn’t to say Trump hasn’t generated or amplified any conspiracy theories. He obviously has. It is simply meant to note that he emerged as a political figure a decade ago from an existing culture in which such claims were common currency. The central advantage Trump possessed in the 2016 Republican presidential primary was that he was willing to agree with false theories in a way that the established politicians against whom he was running were not. His most identifiable issue, immigration, was and is rooted in false claims about foreign powers shipping criminals to the U.S. where they are subverting traditional America. It’s conspiracies all the way down.
The conspiracies that take hold of the right centrally rely on the idea that Elites Are Up To No Good. In any objective context, Trump himself would be considered an elite, given his billions of dollars and his power, even before being elected president. But Trump sided with The People, meaning those beside him in the conspiratorial swamps. Because he stood against The Elites, a loosely bounded group that ostensibly controls America — meaning The People — Trump was granted a seemingly irrevocable dispensation from elitism.
Now, that dispensation is suddenly looking rather wobbly.
The reason? Jeffrey Epstein, the man who encapsulated so many of the characteristics that the conspiratorial right attributes to The Elites: inconceivable wealth, access to powerful politicians and celebrities, a privileged lifestyle (including a private island!) and accusations of criminal sexual deviancy involving minors. All of that was attributable to Epstein even before his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell — a suicide that was quickly presented by conspiracy theorists as something far more suspicious.
By the time Trump announced his presidential candidacy in mid-2015, Epstein was already a felon. The muckraking website Gawker had already published the contents of Epstein’s address book, including more than a dozen phone numbers for Trump and Mar-a-Lago, where Epstein had once been a regular. The site also published logs from Epstein’s private jet; Trump (and former president Bill Clinton) had been passengers multiple times.
But Epstein wasn’t really an issue in the 2016 election.
The salience of Epstein increased once Trump was president, and not only because it was during this period that the disgraced businessman was arrested and died. Trump’s first term in office saw the emergence of a sweeping conspiracy theory about an undercover government employee who was helping Trump conduct a secret, global campaign to uproot a cabal of pedophiles whose membership included various celebrities and (Democratic) politicians.
This was QAnon, which helped explain (as one adherent explained to me at the time) why Trump’s tumultuous, disorganized administration was actually a secret success. The pattern that Trump had leveraged since 2015 appeared again: What appeared to be, wasn’t; what was, was hidden from view.
QAnon caught on. In May 2021, PRRI found that nearly a quarter of Republicans believed in even its most extreme presentation, that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” QAnon’s adherents were a central element of the effort to overturn the 2020 election during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. When Trump left power two weeks later, QAnon dissipated somewhat — though that was in part because its precepts and themes were absorbed and adopted by various right-wing actors, including Trump.
Epstein became a cudgel for the right to use against Trump’s replacement, Joe Biden. It’s much easier to espouse and amplify conspiracy theories when you don’t have the power to rebut them. Allies of Trump’s, like his son Donald Trump Jr. and then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) suggested that there was some nefarious reason that the government wasn’t sharing more information about Epstein, including a theorized set of clients or files in which various other Elites would be implicated.
The idea became so ingrained among Trump’s supporters that the existence of this material was treated as established fact and its release an inevitable element of a second Trump term. He and his allies would be asked about the material and (with a few notable exceptions) would pledge that it would be made public.
And then Trump became president.
There were other places where Trump’s return to the White House put him in a somewhat unsteady position. His advocacy for coronavirus vaccines in his first term had soured in the right-wing media universe since leaving office, for example, but that was easily remedied by tapping one of the country’s foremost anti-vaccination advocates to run the government’s health agencies. Epstein, though? Much harder to circumnavigate.
It probably didn’t help that Trump’s allies, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, weren’t interested in undercutting the right-wing narrative. Early on, she insisted that she was in possession of a client list that was being vetted. Then she — or someone at the Justice Department — attempted to put the whole thing to rest by inviting right-wing social media influencers to the White House and giving them mostly the stuff that had been published by Gawker a decade prior. The pro-Trump right wasn’t satisfied.
Last week, the Justice Department took another approach, releasing a memo flatly rejecting the idea that there was any client list to share. When a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about the memo at a Cabinet meeting, Trump interjected.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he asked. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”
Rumors swirled that senior FBI officials disagreed with the approach — officials who’d often touted conspiracy theories in their prior careers as Trump-aligned right-wing commentators. On Saturday, Trump published a lengthy message on Truth Social defending Bondi and offering a novel explanation for what had happened with the Epstein material: The “client list” conspiracy theory was itself a function of a left-wing conspiracy.
“Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more … created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier,” Trump wrote, invoking various other conspiracy theories he had helped establish as canon on the right.
There are three fundamental challenges for Trump here.
The first is that he doesn’t have the control over conspiratorial thinking that he thinks he has. Again, he piggybacked existing anti-elite theorizing to reach the White House. As the vaccine debate shows, he’s never fully controlled it.
The second is that he is now president. As an expert on conspiracy theories explained to me back in 2017, the powerful have a difficult time leveraging conspiracy theories because those theories are generally tools used to rebut power (like that of The Elites). Presidents could prove a conspiracy theory true, if it were, but cannot prove one false since they are part of a system enmeshed in the theory.
The third, and most important, is that there are unanswerable questions about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. Trump was friends with Epstein. Trump and his family appear multiple times in Epstein’s address book, the only “list” that’s known to exist. Not only can the Justice Department never adequately dismiss a conspiracy theory that centers on government power; Trump is perhaps uniquely powerless to fully dismiss a conspiracy theory with which he is intertwined.
We can assume that the Epstein issue will soon fade from relevance in the national conversation, granting Trump a reprieve from the consternation of much of his base. (The replies to his post on the social media platform he owns have been broadly and unusually disparaging.) However, we can still recognize this moment for the exception that it is: Probably for the first time since he announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump has found himself on The Elites side of the divide against The People. Instead of leveraging the power of conspiratorial thinking, for at least a moment, he is seeing it being used against him.
Given how dependent his political power is on the grip with which he holds his base, even the loosening of one finger may be a weakness he can’t afford.
A Final Ray of Sunshine
Imagine how much worse things would be if Pam Bondi had any sense.
Facing MAGA 