Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn’t
Going to Hurt Trump
July 20, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Listen to this article · 4:57 min Learn more
Share full article
By Matthew Walther
Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing
Opinion writer.
Donald Trump’s political obituary has been written more times than anyone
could hope to count without the resources of a large data processing center.
The “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, impeachments in 2019 and 2021, the
specter of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, a conviction on felony crimes last
year: In these and many other instances, reports of Mr. Trump’s political
demise have been greatly, perhaps even desperately, exaggerated.
Now we are being told that Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-deflating about-face on
the subject of Jeffrey Epstein — the financier and sexual predator whose
suicide in jail and supposed client list Mr. Trump now dismisses as “pretty
boring stuff” — presents a grave threat to his support.
I think this is rather unlikely. Give it a week or a month or a year, and I
suspect that all of it, including any unsealed grand jury transcripts, will be
forgotten by nearly everyone except his political opponents.
There are two popular misconceptions about the sort of conspiracy theories
that swirl around the MAGA movement, both of which lead people to
overestimate the risk Mr. Trump is taking in backing away from these
narratives. One mistake is thinking that such theories are the exclusive
province of flat-earth kooks, rather than a default rhetorical tool of any
political opposition.
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Critics of Bill Clinton accused him of smuggling cocaine through an
Arkansas airport when he was governor of the state and insinuated that he
and his wife were involved in the death of the White House aide Vince
Foster. Opponents of George W. Bush claimed that he stole the 2004
election with the help of rigged electronic voting machines and that he
invaded Iraq to benefit Halliburton, the oil services company for which Dick
Cheney had served as chief executive. Barack Obama was said to be a
Kenyan by birth and ineligible for the presidency. To many of Mr. Trump’s
detractors during his first term, he was a Kremlin asset.
Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or
insane but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth, for
expressing aspirations, anxieties and feelings of hopelessness in the face of
vast structural forces that would otherwise resist deliberation. In the case
of Mr. Epstein, these theories — that he used his sex ring to blackmail
politicians and other powerful people, that he was an Israeli intelligence
operative — reflect a widely shared sense of elite betrayal and institutional
inertia. For many Americans, such stories have far more explanatory power
than, say, a primer on neoliberalism by Wolfgang Streeck.
Our public life is hopelessly saturated with these displaced “truths,” but
they are more like useful metaphors than factual claims. As a result — and
this is the second overlooked feature of conspiracy theories — they can lose
their utility and their salience once their purveyors or those who benefit
from their dissemination obtain power. They are frictionless fictions, and
they can be readily discarded, often without major political cost.
Most Democrats, for example, did not really believe that Mr. Trump was a
Russian agent, and they stopped indulging that fantasy once Joe Biden was
in power. They were sophisticated enough to understand, at least implicitly,
that such stories are a shorthand for the ill-defined malfeasance of their real
or perceived enemies.
Even for the handful of true believers who cling tightly to conspiracy
theories — and the MAGA movement may overindex here — their thinking is
endlessly malleable. When your convictions are invulnerable to falsification,
signs are always taken for wonders. In some circles, Mr. Trump’s very
disavowal of the Epstein theory will become evidence not of his betrayal but
that he is somehow pursuing the guilty more assiduously than ever. “They”
may have gotten to him for now, but you can be sure he is playing a deeper
game.
Editors’ Picks
What Exactly Is a Jet2 Holiday and Why Are People Talking About It?
Is It Fair for a Doctor’s Mom to Get Faster Emergency-Room Care?
Nine Inch Nails Revisits the ’80s, and 9 More New Songs
ADVERTISEMENT
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
For his part, Mr. Trump seems to agree that conspiracy theories are not for
the victorious. When he relegates the “Epstein hoax” to the territory of the
“lunatic left” and calls its theorists “losers” and “past supporters,” what he
suggests is that these ideas are for those out of power — Democrats like
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently engaged in some
Epstein theorizing of her own — and that winners like him have better
things to do.
The ancient riddle of MAGA is whether Mr. Trump is the head of a genuine
populist movement or the object of a personality cult. The fact that Mr.
Trump, despite his dismissiveness this month about the Epstein story, now
feels compelled to release grand jury testimony and other documents
suggests that he is at least somewhat beholden to democratic forces beyond
his control.
But the halfheartedness of his acquiescence is instructive. This is the
closest he has ever come to a betrayal — waffling on a cherished myth —
despite repeatedly failing to deliver on so much of his supposedly radical
political program. I do not think the Epstein affair is an inflection point
capable of answering the MAGA riddle definitively. But it does show us how
frighteningly thin the border has become between politics and performance.
