Trump knows GOP can use this scandal to end him

If you’re like me, you were kinda blindsided by the Epstein scandal, and that’s because, if you’re like me, you are not in thrall to conspiracy theories that claim to explain how reality “really” works, which is to say, “theories” about imaginary villains plotting to take over the world.

Yet here we are, nearly a month into a transformational controversy involving a sex trafficker who years ago killed himself in federal detention and his former best friend, Donald Trump, a president who thrives on conflict — indeed, whose power hinges on fomenting conflict — who now would like everyone to calm down and move on.

The poor man can’t even take credit these days for pretending to solve an international crisis that he alone created without some damn-fool reporter asking about Jeffrey Epstein.

“After Trump announced a major trade agreement between the US and the European Union in Scotland on Sunday, a reporter asked if part of the rush to get the deal done was to knock the Epstein story out of the headlines,” the Washington Postsaid.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me with that,” Trump said.

A month in the age of Trump equals a billion news cycles, so it’s probably safe to say the Epstein scandal isn’t going away soon, if ever, and the longer it goes on, the worse things are going to get. There are just too many people with too much incentive to let go.

I don’t only mean the Democrats and their angling before the midterms.

I mean some Republicans have incentive, especially those who are seeing the Epstein scandal as both an expiration date on Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party and a means by which they can position themselves to take full advantage of that eventuality. Trump is old. He’s in poor health. He’s in some stage of cognitive decline. Ambitious Republicans can now treat him like a RINO, push for the release of the Epstein files, and look even more MAGA while doing it.

And I mean MAGA influencers, like Chaya Raichik and Nick Fuentes. They were instrumental over the last half-decade in spreading the gospel of the Epstein files though social media, podcasts and TikTok. They became a powerful faction by exploiting the fear and paranoia of believers in QAnon, as well as the fear and paranoia of those who are not conspiracy theorists, per se, but who nevertheless care about their reputations as defenders of the sexual innocence of underage girls.

Like ambitious Republicans, MAGA influencers can see an opportunity to become even more influential with their audiences by never being satisfied with whatever Trump does to put the Epstein scandal to rest. (Consider, for instance, how Elon Musk apparently perceives Trump’s gambit to tamper with Ghislaine Maxwell’s congressional testimony.)

I could be wrong, but it looks to me like the Epstein scandal is going to dog Trump the way the scandal over his age dogged Joe Biden. Like the former president, Trump is getting to a point where he can’t talk about anything without appearing to deliberately draw attention away from an issue that too many people have too much incentive to let alone.

Biden told the truth. No one listened.

Trump lies. Is anyone listening?

The comparison between Trump’s Epstein and Biden’s age makes more sense than you might think.

Both controversies come from the same pool of fear and paranoia. To MAGA, Epstein represented a shadowy (and Jewish) cabal of criminal super-elites who secretly conspire with enemies, foreign and domestic, to control the United States government, the corporations and the media. To MAGA, Biden’s age wasn’t really about him or his age, but how he was too old and weak to be in charge. Biden was a puppet, from the conspiratorial viewpoint, and the shadowy cabal represented by Epstein was his puppetmaster.

The cult of MAGA is used to thinking about Biden’s age in conspiratorial terms, but so is the Washington press corps, though the conspiracies in question are very different in nature. In a recent interview, NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the Epstein files. He then asked whether the Democrats were guilty of a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s age.

Jake Tapper’s crackbrained book is the obvious subtext for such a question, but so is the fact that lots of Democratic voters didn’t want Biden to run again. In large part, I think, that’s because the conspiracy theories related to Epstein helped undermine confidence in his ability to campaign. (Yes, the debate seemed to validate that feeling later.)

Conspiracy theories start small but grow rapidly if there’s enough incentive and enough means to circulate them. Given the Washington press corps’ need for conflict and “hidden truths,” there was incentive aplenty. Given the expansion of the internet and the contraction of local news over the last decade, there was plenty of means, too.

No matter what Biden did — save the country from COVID, revive domestic industries, decrease inflation, increase wages, and so on — his transformative accomplishments could not rise above the din over his age, a din that came from the merger of conspiracy theories about a secret cabal plotting to take over the world and incentives from inside and outside the Democratic Party to keep suspicions going.

Just three and half weeks into the Epstein scandal, it’s possible to imagine Trump becoming as isolated as Biden was in the end, particularly from his purported allies. The lower his polling numbers go, as a result of the Epstein scandal, the faster his isolation might be. It took nearly four years for Biden’s approval on inflation to drop to -30 percent. For Trump, it took less than six months.