Donald Trump helped create a monster. Now he’d like for everyone to ignore it.
After years of sounding dog whistles and peddling outright conspiracism to work his supporters into a lather about global pedophile rings, Trump is telling those same people to move on. Earlier today, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy—a pillar of the MAGA cinematic universe—is a “hoax” and went so far as to disavow his “PAST supporters” over the issue. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work,” he wrote. “I don’t want their support anymore!” The responses poured in immediately on the platform. It is not going well for Trump. “Why was Epstein in prison then? How about Ghislaine? For a hoax? I don’t think so,” a top reply to the post reads. “This is the hill we all die on.”
In short, Trump appears to have lost control of the situation. In a second term that’s been defined by chaos, unpopular policies, and the dismantling of the federal government, Trump has managed to bounce back from one scandal after another. Except, perhaps, from this one. If there’s one person who can derail a Trump presidency, it appears that it might be a convicted sex offender who has been dead nearly six years.
The Jeffrey Epstein saga is just about perfect, as conspiracy theories go. At its core, it’s about a cabal of corrupt billionaires, politicians, and celebrities exploiting children on a distant island—catnip for online influencers and QAnon types who have bought into any number of outlandish stories. Yet for such a dark conspiracy theory, there’s a great deal we know about Epstein’s life and crimes. There are unsealed court transcripts, flight records, victim statements. His black book has been reported on, giving the public access to names of people Epstein is thought to have associated with (though some have said they don’t know why he had their information). There’s real investigative reporting, much of it from the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, who spoke with detectives and victims and provided a fuller account of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and the attempts to downplay his crimes. Brown also credits the police officers who continued to press on their own investigation as federal officials seemed to wave it away. The case is real and horrifying, which gives life to all the wild speculation: If this is true, why not that?
At the center is a genuine secret, the main thing that keeps the story from fading away: the specter of Epstein’s so-called client list, a document that supposedly contains the names of powerful people whom Epstein provided girls to. This list is the basis for the most sordid and compelling parts of the conspiracy theory: that Epstein not only facilitated the trafficking of these girls to elites, but that he then entrapped and extorted those elites. The Trump administration had teased the release of this list as though it were a blockbuster movie, even though its very existence remains an open question: Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” But in an abrupt reversal last week, the Department of Justice and the FBI released a memo saying that the list would not be coming after all and that the list did not even exist, an announcement that has enraged many prominent members of the MAGA base and captured the interest of, well, everyone else.
In 2025, it feels as if no news story can hold attention for more than a few days, yet the Epstein story has been an exception—a mass attentional event with few parallels. It is the rare episode that can nominally unite Elon Musk and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and create common ground between tinfoil-hatted conspiracists and average, curious news consumers. The Epstein conspiracy theory belongs to everyone and answers to no party. It is an unstable compound—one that’s being used by political actors everywhere to get attention or score political points.
The Epstein ordeal speaks to the American psyche like no conspiracy since the JFK assassination and feels liable to explode. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who effectively reopened the case back in 2017 with a series of investigative articles, said, “I’m not convinced he committed suicide,” on a podcast this week. And in The American Prospect, David Dayen wrote that the Epstein ordeal is also a legitimate policy issue that exposes fault lines in America’s justice system. All the while, the supposed client list is a perfect conspiracist document: With its actual contents unknown, anyone purported to have spent time in Epstein’s orbit (a large grouping of influential individuals including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton) could be on the list. All you have to do is imagine.
The longer the list stays in the dark, the more power it accrues. The Epstein case is threatening to tear apart Trump’s coalition. For a man with an obvious ability to command news cycles and wield attention, Trump has bungled his response to all of this, suggesting that Barack Obama, the Biden administration, and James Comey made up the files, and admonishing many of his most loyal supporters over Truth Social to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” This, of course, has only aroused interest and suspicion.
Now the people around Trump—many of them current or former MAGA news personalities and influencers who had previously leveraged Epstein’s death as a piece of political propaganda—have been forced to make an awkward choice between pursuing a story they’ve touted for years as a massive government cover-up or siding with Trump. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign from his post over the administration’s handling of the situation; Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday that the DOJ should release more information; and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (a proud conspiracy theorist) appears livid. But the establishment is starting to fall into place: House Republicans voted unanimously yesterday to block the release of additional Epstein files. Influencers who once tweeted that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” are now tripping over themselves to reverse course. They are audience-captured in two directions—pleasing Trump would mean displeasing their audiences, and vice versa—leaving them to make an awkward choice.
What happens next is uncharacteristically hard to predict. With any other story, the MAGA diehards would all but certainly put this incident behind them or find some way to turn it back on the Democrats. The president, with his cries of “hoax,” is certainly trying to give them the blueprint to do just that. But Trump and his acolytes seem to have underestimated not only their base, but the salience of the Epstein story itself.
The MAGA movement is used to dictating terms with its audience and posting away any potential cognitive dissonance that might arise. But this story is unusually persistent. Yesterday afternoon, as Trump praised Bondi for her handling of the investigation and pro-Trump pundits tried to pivot away from the story, Wired reported that the surveillance footage released by the DOJ and the FBI showing the area near Epstein’s prison cell on the night of his death had nearly three minutes cut out, contradicting Bondi’s own claim that just one minute was removed as part of a system reset. Pure, uncut conspiracy-theory fodder.
Whatever happens next will be a defining moment for Trump. However strange it seems to measure the Epstein conspiracy theory against, say, the president’s approach to tariffs or his bombing of Iran, this is the stuff Trump’s mythology is based on. Trump has positioned himself as an outsider who shares enemies with his base—namely, elites. It hasn’t mattered to his supporters that Trump is an elite himself; the appeal, and the narrative, is that Trump wants to punish the same people his supporters loathe. In appearing to bury the Epstein list—which, again, may or may not exist—by calling it a “hoax” and pinning it to his “PAST supporters,” Trump is pushing up against the limits of this narrative—as well as his ability to command attention and use it to bend the world to his whims. If Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem can successfully spin the Epstein debacle into a conspiracy theory that helps them, or if they can make the story stop, it would suggest once again that his grip on the party and its base is total: an impenetrable force field no bit of reality can puncture.
What if they fail? Maybe this is what it looks like when Trump loses his vise grip on his supporters. But this is late-stage conspiracism: a noxious mix of real events and twisted theories egged on by shameless attention merchants and fed into an insatiable internet until it spins out of control, transcending fact and fiction and becoming unstoppable. What if the desire for answers isn’t about justice, truth, or even politics at all? What if the Epstein dead-enders could never be satisfied, even by the publication of a client list? What if they would continue to allege further cover-ups, that the conspiracy was still alive?
All the anger may just be the result of an addiction to an information ecosystem that has conditioned people to expect a right to “evidence” that justifies any belief they might hold. To believe such a thing would suggest that the epistemic rot, reality decay, and culture of conspiracism are not by-products of a specific politician or political movement, but something deeper—something intrinsic to the platforms, culture, and systems that define our lives. It would suggest that the fever will never break.
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