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Some enchanted evening, Donald Trump saw a stranger across a crowded room.
It is likely that there is hardly anyone living who knows exactly under what glowing lights Donald Trump met Jeffrey Epstein, except perhaps Trump himself and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is serving a 20-year prison term for helping to procure minors for sexual abuse. Trump said in an interview in 2002, when his Epstein relationship was still tight, that it had been a 15-year mutual admiration society. 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”. Epstein described himself as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”.
The 1990s and early 2000s were the heyday of the Trump-Epstein romp. Roger Stone, Trump’s dirty trickster who was dumped from the 1994 Bob Dole presidential campaign when he and his wife were exposed apparently advertising for threesomes, was a hanger-on in the Palm Beach demimonde. “There’s 100 beautiful women and 10 guys. Look, how cool are we?” he told the Washington Post in 2016. “I was happy to be invited. I mean, it was great.”
The Trump biographer Michael Wolff told me on my podcast The Court of History how Epstein opened his safe in his New York townhouse for him to retrieve a pile of about a dozen photographs of Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion. “They were kind of spread out like playing cards,” Wolff said. “And it was Trump – with girls of uncertain age. In two of them, topless girls are sitting on Trump’s lap. In another, he has a visible stain on his pants while several girls are laughing and pointing at it.” Wolff said: “I think it’s certainly not unlikely that they were in the safe when the FBI came in after his arrest and took everything.”
Wolff initially mentioned his taped conversations with Epstein about his relationship with Trump in the Daily Beast, in which Wolff made a glancing reference to this incident, and in the Yale Review in November 2024. In response to Wolff’s latest book on Trump, All or Nothing, on the 2024 campaign, the White House stated Wolff had a “peanut-sized brain”. In June of this year, after Wolff claimed Trump held a “grudge” against Harvard because he had applied to be a student and was rejected, Trump posted it was “False”, and that Wolff is “a Third Rate Reporter, who is laughed at even by the scoundrels of the Fake News”.
The White House issued a statement that Trump “didn’t need to apply to an overrated, corrupt institution like Harvard”.
Since 10 August 2019, when Epstein’s body was found in his cell with an orange sheet wrapped around his neck at the New York Metropolitan correction center under suspicious circumstances, declared a suicide by Attorney General William Barr, he has been raised into a phantasmagorical presence that will not vanish. Epstein has become the Ark of the Covenant in the cosmology of rightwing conspiracies. When its doors are opened it will supposedly reveal the ultimate secrets of deep state pedophiles. 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 pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation”.
The road 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 parlor, to January 6 was a straight line. Half of Republicans believed that “leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse – what some people refer to as ‘Pizzagate’” was true or probably true, according to a December 2016 Economist/YouGov poll.
Trump gave credence to the QAnon pedophile theory in October 2020, when he was asked about it at an NBC News town hall. “Let me ask you about QAnon,” said Savannah Guthrie. “It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that.” After replying seven times that he didn’t know about it, Trump said: “Let me just tell you, what I do hear about it, is they are very strongly against pedophilia. And I agree with that. I mean, I do agree with that. And I agree with it very strongly.”
A few months later, many in the mob assaulting the Capitol were QAnon believers, though the percentage could not be tabulated. A group of social scientists found that belief in QAnon theories correlated directly with “support for the January 6 insurrection”. More than a third of Republicans believed that the FBI (ie the Deep State) “instigated” the January 6 assault, according to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll.
For decades Trump has cultivated paranoid conspiracy theories to foster a cult around himself. His method existed long before Rush Limbaugh loudly burst into talk radio, but Trump inflames paranoia hour by hour to make himself unavoidable. When Trump makes an accusation it’s news – Joe McCarthy’s technique. The ever-shifting series of conspiracy claims from birtherism onward have been monetized into a reliable cash cow by rightwing media. Bottom-feeding serves the bottom line. Every newly invented plot keeps the machine whirring. Maga is constantly tantalized, addicted and perpetuated.
The uses of Trump’s conspiracism are complex, from the profane to the holy. The demonology has elevated Trump into a savior of the Magatariat from the globalist elites and fiendish pedophiles. No greater evil can be projected. It’s more than a theory; it’s a theology. Epstein wraps it all up, explains all, proves all – Pizzagate meets the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Lyndon Johnson had his credibility gap with the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon had his 18-minute gap in his White House tapes. Trump now is bedeviled by his conspiracy theory gap.
All the president’s men – and women – have stoked the Epstein plot. Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI, demanded in 2023: “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” He urged listeners to his talk show “not let that story go” and blamed “people in the Washington swamp who are not telling you the truth”. Kash Patel, the FBI director, repeatedly claimed in 2023 that the Biden administration and Democrats in the Congress were withholding documents about Epstein “because of who’s on that list”.
On 27 February, Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed 15 Maga influencers to a press event where she handed out binders labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1”, which contained no new information. Anger simmered. On 14 March, Bondi stated on Fox News that the Epstein “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review”, raising the expectation among the Maga believers that such a “client list” existed and that powerful Democrats would be revealed. The “client list” allegedly contained the names of Democrats for whom Epstein trafficked girls and then blackmailed.
On 5 June, Elon Musk, accelerating his orbit away from Trump’s gravitation, posted: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk then deleted his post.
But, on 6 July, the Department of Justice issued an unsigned statement that there was “no incriminating ‘client list’”, “no credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals”, and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted”.
Bondi’s insistence that Epstein kept no “client list” of people he supposedly blackmailed may well be true. . But Bondi debunked a falsehood that had become an article of faith for Maga believers. It was bait for the base.
The Maga world erupted. “Please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, posted. “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment.” Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, for example, posted: “GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!” Tucker Carlson called it a “cover-up” of Epstein as a secret agent for Israeli intelligence. “Why was he doing this, on whose behalf, and where was the money coming from?”
Steve Bannon roused the rightwing cadres at the Turning Point USA convention on 13 July. “Epstein,” he said, “is a key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments and who was working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government.”
Trump’s grooming of his followers cannot be undone. Decades of propaganda have become gospel truth. The Maga base and Republicans generally have not cared about Trump’s sexual abuse of women. After the two E Jean Carroll trials in which Trump was found liable for defaming her by claiming she was lying about his sexual assault, the hush-money payments to silence Stormy Daniels for her sexual relationship with him, and numerous credible reports of dozens of women who have come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by Trump, a poll in the fall of 2024 conducted by a conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute, showed that only 5% of Trump voters “believe he did commit sexual assault”.
E Jean Carroll told me that a number of women have come to her to relate similar assaults, but do not want to become public figures out of fear of retribution. For Maga, and Republicans, if there is any distinction, these stories are unworthy of attention. They sanitize and dismiss such predations, while claims of child molestation incite them. Justifying a sexual libertine like Trump, they have held him up as a white knight avenger against pedophiles, remade him into a purifying figure, the defender of the innocent.
Since Bondi issued her statement that the Epstein “client list” did not exist, Trump’s attempts to stamp out the flames have become more frenetic. He went from urging his supporters to move on to telling them to get lost.
His first remark was to chide a reporter who asked about it: “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”
Trump got more frustrated. “For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again,” Trump posted on Truth Social, blaming the files on Democrats. “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden administration.” It was “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein”.
Trump tried to rally his base. “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’?” Trump posted. “They are all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!”
Trump reportedly phoned Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, which had served as a forum for criticism of his handling of the Epstein affair, to quiet him. The glib talkshow host announced: “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being.” As promised, Kirk shut up, but the Maga chorus kept chirping.
Enraged, Trump posted on 16 July that the “new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker … Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats’ work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!” At a bilateral meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain, Trump lashed out at “stupid Republicans”.
Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson, invariably a loyal soldier, but who felt forced to respond to the disturbance of the base, called for an investigation. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, asked that Ghislaine Maxwell appear as a witness. Do they think an inquiry would not come to focus on the evidence perhaps in the FBI’s possession of Trump’s gamey relationship with Epstein, rather than the mythical “client list”?
Under the stress of the Epstein controversy that will not disappear at Trump’s command, the unpopularity of his One Big Beautiful Bill, the public’s rejection of his brutal deportation methods, and the weakening of the economy as a result of his mad tariffs, Trump is becoming more unhinged, speaking openly of firing the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who, unlike Epstein, is a live target. Crashing the economy might serve as a temporary distraction. Then, in a fit of retributive pique, his administration fired James Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, a prosecutor in the office of the southern district of New York, who had handled the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases.
Trump lost more control. Facing backlash, he asked Bondi to seek to release Epstein grand jury material, which almost certainly contained no reference to him and was a substitute for the full files, throwing oil on the fire. Trump pressured the Wall Street Journal and its owner Rupert Murdoch not to publish a letter he wrote in honor of Epstein’s 50th birthday. The Journal reported: “It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair. The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” On Friday, Trump sued the Journal and Murdoch.
The ghost of Epstein haunts Trump. He cannot dispel his spirit. “Not a fan, not a fan,” he muttered in the past, trying to distance himself. But Epstein continues to swoop in – “a guy who never dies”. Until evidence of Trump’s participation in Epstein’s transgressions is either established or discredited, including the photographs that Michael Wolff claimed Epstein showed him, Epstein will never die.
If Epstein were to appear to Trump at night as an apparition, his Marley’s ghost, he might warn him that there is no happy ending.
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Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast
English (US) ·