Michelle Goldberg
Trump’s Fans Forgive
Him Everything. Why Not Epstein?
July 14, 2025, 7:01 p.m. ET
Opinion Columnist
Over the last squalid
decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say
anything to shake the faith of his ardent base. They’ve been largely unfazed by
boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely
self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a
wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose
devotion to Trump endured even when she was put in ICE detention. “I will
support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America
great again.”
So it’s been fascinating
to watch a vocal part of Trump’s movement revolt over his administration’s
handling of files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex-trafficking
financier who died in jail in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. Running for
president, Trump promised to release the Epstein files, which some thought
would contain evidence of murder. “Yet another good reason to vote for Trump,”
Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, wrote on social media. “Americans
deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
Some of the influencers
who now staff Trump’s administration built their followings by spinning wild
stories about the case, promising revelations that would lay their enemies low.
Epstein’s client list “is going to rock the political world,” Dan Bongino, now
deputy director of the F.B.I., said in September. Appearing on Fox News in
February, Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked whether her department would
release “a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.” She responded, “It’s sitting on
my desk right now to review.”
Now she says there was no such client
list. Last week, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. released a memo saying
that Epstein killed himself and no more information would be forthcoming: “It
is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”
Trump has implored his followers to forget about Epstein, writing, in a
petulant Truth Social post, that the files were “written by Obama, Crooked
Hillary” and various other deep state foes. Let’s “not waste Time and Energy on
Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote.
But he was wrong: Lots
of people care. Trump’s followers responded to his attempt to wave Epstein away
with uncharacteristic fury and disappointment. Bongino has reportedly
threatened to resign over Bondi’s handling of the case. Epstein was a major
subject at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, a conservative conference
that began on Friday. Speaking from the stage in Tampa, Fla., the comedian Dave
Smith accused Trump of actively covering up “a giant child rapist ring.” The
audience cheered and applauded.
Having nurtured
conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in
danger of being consumed by one. In many ways it’s delicious to watch, but
there’s also reason for anxiety, because for some in Trump’s movement, this
setback is simply proof that they’re up against a conspiracy more powerful than
they’d ever imagined. “What we just learned is that dealing with the Epstein
Operation is above the President’s pay grade,” posted Bret Weinstein, an
evolutionary biologist and podcaster. An important question, going forward, is
who they decide is pulling the strings.
Epstein obsessives are
right to be suspicious about the weird turns the case has taken. So much about
it feels inexplicable, including the sweetheart plea deal Epstein got in 2008,
and the fact that he was apparently able to kill himself despite being one of
the most monitored inmates in the country. Even if it turns out that a review
of the case doesn’t implicate anyone who hasn’t already been charged, it should
be a scandal that Bondi misled the public about the existence of a client list.
But the administration
lies all the time — that alone doesn’t explain why this issue has so tested the
MAGA coalition. To understand why it’s such a crisis, you need to understand
the crucial role that Epstein plays in the mythologies buttressing MAGA. The
case is of equal interest to QAnon types, who see in Epstein’s crimes proof of
their conviction that networks of elite pedophiles have hijacked America, and
of right-wing critics of Israel, who are convinced that Epstein worked for the
Mossad, the country’s spy service.
Trumpism has always been premised on
the idea that he’s warring against dark, even satanic globalist forces, and
within the movement there’s a fierce yearning for the cathartic moment when
those forces will be exposed and vanquished. The Epstein files were supposed to
show the world, once and for all, the scale of the evil system that Trump’s
voters believe he is fighting. “Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many
things,” Steve Bannon said at the Turning Point conference.
The way Trumpists have
made this case a cause célèbre can seem bizarre to outsiders. After all,
Trump’s friendship with the sex-trafficking financier has been widely
documented. Epstein’s best-known victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was
recruited at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club. And Trump has his own history of
alleged creepiness around underage girls; several teenage contestants in one of
his beauty pageants accused him of deliberately walking in on them when they
were undressed. As Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said at a rally
this weekend, “Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used
to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?”
But I’ve always seen the
fantasy of Trump as a warrior against sex trafficking as a way for his
followers to manage their cognitive dissonance about his obvious personal
degeneracy. To believe that they are on the side of light while championing a
man of such low character, Trump’s acolytes have had to conjure an enemy of
vast and titanic evil, and invent a version of Trump that never existed.
Among those on the right
who believe there’s an Epstein coverup, few seem to be entertaining the idea
that Trump is protecting himself. That, after all, would require a
re-evaluation of his integrity and their judgment. But they still take for
granted that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful men and then
blackmailing them, and that he was killed so he couldn’t talk. Now they have to
figure out why Trump won’t give them the information they long for. The most
logical explanation, said Tucker Carlson on his podcast last week, is “that
intel services are at the very center of this story, U.S. and Israeli, and
they’re being protected.”
This notion has become
so widespread that Israel’s government tried to address it. “There is no
evidence — none — that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of
Israel,” wrote the
Israeli minister Amichai Chikli in an open letter addressed to Turning Point’s
head, Charlie Kirk. But Chikli couldn’t resist using the case against his more
centrist political enemies, saying he wants to understand Epstein’s connection
to “former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who both appear
in previously published Epstein-related documents.”
This will not, I suspect, put theories
about Epstein as a Zionist operative to bed. Without them, Trump’s followers
would have to admit they were duped, that MAGA has never been a Manichaean
battle against sex criminals, and Trump glommed onto the Epstein story only to
help him win an election.
The entanglement of the
Epstein drama with American debates about the Jewish state portends some dark
developments. I won’t pretend to know whether Epstein ever worked for the
Israelis, though I can’t imagine Trump covering for them at any cost to himself.
I’m worried, however, about people blaming Jews for the strange and
unresolvable parts of his sordid story. Scroll through X, and you’ll see they
already are.
It’s worth recalling the origin of the
phrase “cognitive dissonance,” which was coined in the 1950s by Leon Festinger,
an author of the book “When Prophecy Fails.” Festinger and his co-authors
studied an apocalyptic U.F.O. cult, with an eye to what happened when the
spaceship didn’t appear as predicted. Some members, disillusioned, left the
group. Most, however, maintained or redoubled their commitment. The problem for
Trump is that some of his followers need to choose between their commitment to
him, and to the narrative that justified his rise.
