What makes the Jeffrey Epstein case different from other conspiracy theories

Trump owes his position to elaborate inventions. Now he finds himself uniquely ensnared in one.

Donald Trump may be the antithesis of justice and poetry, but his supporters’ collective rending of garments over his mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein file contains generous measures of both. Poetic justice is going too far, but it’s at least a few lines of rhyming retribution.

Starting more than a decade ago, when he made himself the public face of the racist myth that Barack Obama couldn’t possibly be a natural-born American, Trump has ridden the conspiracy theory tiger to improbable peaks of power. But he suddenly finds himself thrown from its back and staring up at its merciless business end.

That’s because the Epstein case is different from all the other tall tales the president has invented and promoted in two crucial and potentially fateful respects. First, it concerns an actual criminal conspiracy that raises more legitimate questions than most of the gas rising from the reactionary swamps. Second, Trump has far too many personal and official entanglements with the story to credibly assume his favorite posture, that of the hectoring bystander.

The prison cell where Jeffrey Epstein died. (New York Ciy Chief Medical Examiner’s Office)

Much of the thinking surrounding Epstein is indeed the stuff of standard conspiracy theory. Unproven speculations — that some list of the financier’s fellow predators has yet to be revealed, that he was the victim of a jailhouse hit made to look like a suicide, that he was a foreign intelligence asset and so on — are assumed to be factual and expected to confirm believers’ prejudices. No wonder Trump and his hangers-on figured they could harness the story for their own purposes, much as they have so many others.

Yet unlike, say, the case of the immigrants who subsisted on labradoodles or the android who ran the federal government, the Epstein case justifies plenty of reasonable suspicion. Epstein was wealthy, connected and implicated in a complex plot to systematically traffic and abuse women and girls, and the initial disposition of his case was grotesquely lenient. Even after heroic investigative reporting forced further prosecution of Epstein and an accomplice, any other co-conspirators continued to escape accountability. And Epstein’s death in custody shortly after his arrest, ruled a suicide under dubious circumstances, precluded whatever revelations might have come of a trial.

The Trump administration’s calamitous response to its own supporters’ concerns about all this has only made them seem more rather than less valid, encouraging even mainstream Democrats and beat reporters to join the chorus demanding answers. The FBI director and deputy director, the attorney general, the vice president and the president himself (albeit with comically obvious reluctance) promised their followers satisfaction but ultimately produced nothing of the kind. And what they have released has only raised more questions.

Trump, meanwhile, has become an increasingly desperate caricature of a man with something to hide, attacking his own faithful as weak and stupid and, as if to prove that he believes as much, hastily manufacturing the counter-conspiracy-theory that the Epstein files were somehow concocted by his political enemies.

Maybe the president will eventually deceive, distract and distance himself enough to convince most of his adherents, but that has proved difficult so far. The trouble is that Trump’s friendship with Epstein is well-documented in text and images; the prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s farcical wrist-slapping was a member of Trump’s first Cabinet; Trump was the president when Epstein died in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons; and, of course, he is the president now, giving him extensive power to disclose whatever information is in the possession of the government that repeatedly investigated Epstein. He could certainly do much more than tell Attorney General Pam Bondi to ask a court to release “pertinent” grand jury testimony, as he did Thursday soon after the Wall Street Journal reported that he wrote a suggestive birthday note to Epstein.

The relationship between the two men was almost magically easy for Trump’s fans to overlook as long as he and his minions were telling them what they wanted to hear about the supposedly forthcoming Epstein files — all the better to keep the conspiracy theory in peaceful alignment with their biases, as all the most powerful conspiracy theories are. But now that Trump is expressly challenging the theory itself, his very real connections with the case are harder to ignore. He is forcing his followers to choose between their devotion to him and their certainty that the government he now runs is concealing incriminating information. It’s probably the hardest such choice between deeply held beliefs that many of them have had to make.

Could a master of fabrication thereby be more undone by a conspiracy theory than by any of his actual high crimes and far-reaching failures? It would make better poetry than politics.