After months of bureaucratic delay and years of being trivialized as nutjob conspiracy fodder, the Epstein scandal has ostensibly taken one of its final steps toward being unraveled. The bill, directing the Department of Justice to release all files pertaining to the case, has been passed by the House, Senate and signed by President Donald Trump — with Rep. Troy Nehls lighting a cigar on the steps of the Capitol and continuing to call the matter a “hoax by the Democrats.”
Indeed, that does seem to be the new MAGA party line, as Trump has belligerently reminded his supporters and reporters over and over again. Yet for possibly the first time on such a scale, Trump’s blatant obfuscations have led his most fervent supporters to lose trust in the idea that he really had nothing to do with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The DOJ has 30 days to fork over the files, with a few caveats, of course. It could choose to withhold any already classified files, which is an unknowable group knocked out already. This is on top of any files which identify victims or include graphic evidence of sexual abuse, not to mention that anything ordered sealed by a court will remain sealed. It seems conceivable that plenty of files redacted for identifying victims would also therein identify their victimizers, which is the exact kind of information we’re seeking to glean from the release.
Perhaps the biggest unknown in all this is the provision that records can be withheld if they would jeopardize an active investigation. This could be justified through the new investigation into Democrats ordered by Trump, or the now reopened one into Epstein, withholding truly sensitive documents while highlighting those which incriminate the President’s enemies.
It would seem we have nothing left but a veritable nothingburger of a news story, which will slide off Teflon Don like these things often do. Regardless of all the limiters on the release, actionable information has been released from preliminary file dumps by Democrats and Republicans, implicating prominent businessmen like Peter Thiel, Les Wexner, Jared Kushner and Elon Musk. It’s also caused career shakeups for political and educational figures as well as journalists like Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Michael Wolff, exposing potentially illicit links with celebrities like David Blaine, Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, as well as scientific minds like Robert Trivers and Stephen Hawking. These people and many others maintained complex interpersonal links with Epstein, coming to him for financial and political advice, and a good level of immoral debauchery as well.
It’s easy to forget the scale of the implications for this scandal, when we reduce the situation down to “girls and women harmed by powerful men.” Epstein’s contacts were wide ranging across many industries to the very top of society. At this point, any one of those contacts may have not only been aware of his conduct, but complicit and even participatory, in a wide-ranging pedophilic conspiracy implicating all levels of society.
While conspiracy theories are a bipartisan venture, the MAGA movement has more openly flirted with these types of ideas in public discourse than other mainstream ideologies. But for a voter base as charged against conspiracy by the elite as any other, the Trump administration has no way of leaving this situation unscathed. Photos of prominent sexual criminals and Epstein, Weinstein and Prince Andrew at a royal birthday party give an idea of the potential scale of conspiracy to the average eye.
What’s ironic is that Trump banked so heavily on stoking this flame for both of his elections, despite the clear and present fact that Epstein knew Trump intimately and compromisingly — up until his oft-questioned death during Trump’s first term in 2019. Regardless of whether MAGA-prone representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene keep kissing the ring, it’s clear the ideologically concerned in the party are turning sharply on a President who appears more guilty each day.
Regardless of Trump’s insistence to get off the Epstein story, his turnaround on the matter was both a clear defeat and a sign of hope. With just four Republican Representatives jumping the fence and compelling Trump’s strategy to crumble, the whole country saw how easy it was for the president and his stooges to be intimidated. Even hardliners like Greene displayed an out-of-character pursuit for truth and justice, which has earned her a bevy of death threats for her deepening schism with Trump. According to her, the split has “all come down to the Epstein files,” but it’s prompted Trump to lash out with accusations of treachery and openly musing about other candidates running for her position.
It was a mistake to treat this scandal like any of Trump’s others, like an international sex crime conspiracy was the same type of indiscretion as making fun of a disabled reporter. His supporters can’t hide behind the excuse that Trump is merely saying it like it is, or using his knowledge of the system to help those stepped over by the government — Trump has systematically used his power to escape the consequences of his evidently long, complicated relationship with sex criminal financier Epstein.
The Epstein scandal is a crucible for the MAGA movement, a test of whether this ideology has any legs beyond a cult of personality grown around a corrupt billionaire who turned out like all the rest. Even if no critical mass is able to form and remove Trump from office, can he ever reach his former levels of appeal? If the populace associates Trump with one of the most horrific networks of widescale sexual abuse in modern history, can they ever trust that he’s the one exception to a conspiracy of elite, immoral predators?
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Noah Zaldivar at [email protected].