Epstein: The Gift that Keeps On Giving

 

The Epstein scandal is not just about those elusive files, though seeing them released would surely be a hallelujah moment. Don’t hold your breath.

The scandal is really about a massive set of laughably contradictory lies, all of which add up to one big whopper of a question: Did Donald Trump have sex with underage girls, courtesy of his long-time sidekick, Jeffrey Epstein?

It seems almost certain that he did, and on multiple occasions. Which is why he needs to lie about it like he’s never lied before. Talk about a high bar.

Driftglass, of The Professional Left Podcast, has called this “the load-bearing lie” — the lie that has to carry far more weight than all the thousands of other lies that define the Trump era.

A load-bearing lie is a lie that must not fail, under any circumstances, lest the entire house of lesser lies implode.

Watching the fact-free, logically bereft tap dancing being performed almost daily by the likes of JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and Trump himself, it’s clear that they think Trump is prominently featured in the Epstein files. And while everything they say contradicts what they said the day before, their spasmodic gyrations convince nobody. The coverup is as transparent as it is inept.

This is causing a serious rift among the true believers — that dangerous horde of QAnonists, evangelical cranks, incels, gun nuts, and assorted MAGA loons, all of whom are deeply invested in the solemn belief that all Democrats are pedophiles.

We laugh, but this is not an exaggeration. Most of us have no knowledge of that alternate universe. We don’t see it, so we don’t get how such a vile trope could embed itself so deeply into a culture, or how it could have become an article of faith among Trump’s rubes.

But now these same rubes are getting riled up at the refusal of Trump to release the files. Their logic is irrefutable, if profoundly warped: How could he refuse to release information that proves, once and for all, that child molesters run the Democratic party?

In QAnon circles, this is common knowledge, and they’re pissed at Trump for withholding the story. The obsession with pedophilia was once way out on the fringes, but under Trump it’s gone mainstream.

Surely, part of this is projection. As I’ve written before, the real pedophiles — the ones who actually get caught, convicted, and do time — are disproportionately conservative men, often clergy, preying on the children of the gullibly religious. Between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church, the documented cases of underage sex abuse are as widespread as they are sordid.

But projection doesn’t fully explain the obsession. There’s brainwashing at work, as well. Republicans have spent half a century demonizing Democrats, and there's a constant need for language that escalates in nastiness over time. 

Their name-calling has always been vicious, and they deploy it incessantly, playing the long game of mass manipulation through insidious propaganda. The word “communist” has been used to slime Democratic candidates since the early fifties, and they still roll it out regularly. “Baby-killers” is another classic, a persistent bludgeon since the Roe v. Wade decision was first handed down. To this day, people with weak minds believe that we Democrats absolutely adore waiting until our babies are born before aborting them.

The propaganda machine continues to crank out the lies and promote them through the media. Once we were firmly established as baby-killers, it was but a short step from there to pedophiles. The idea caught on.

Which is why it’s all the more bizarre to watch the whole pedophile obsession get turned back on itself, to the point where it’s traumatizing the whole MAGA ecosystem.

The attempts to counter the groundswell of anger have been predictably amateurish. When JD Vance says, “Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein island all the time,” he digs himself into several holes at once.

First, he’s either betraying knowledge of the files that he shouldn’t legally have, or he’s just making things up as he goes along — either way, he’s defending transparent lies with transparent lies.

Second, he implies that only Democrats were involved with Epstein, which is absurd on its face. If it were true, Trump would release the files in a heartbeat.

But what Vance does most of all is shine a spotlight on what Trump was doing for all those years he was hanging with Epstein, back when they were sharing each other’s houses, planes, and girlfriends. How many of those girlfriends were underaged? How many of those planes crossed state lines? How many felonies were committed in how many states?

This is where the load-bearing lie starts to wobble. Because the truth — which is starting to penetrate even the dimmest of the dim bulbs — is that Trump was the star of the show. If “Epstein Island” were a reality series, it would be the highest-rated of all time, and I’m guessing there’s enough X-rated footage for several seasons’ worth. Trump could win an Emmy.

We don’t know for sure that Trump is a main character in the files, but there’s no great leap of logic required. There’s enough, just in the public record, to make inferences even the rubes can see are damning. Plus, Trump continues to obsessively divert, distract, and cover up his involvement, to the point where he’s now hemorrhaging credibility even among those who think he has any.

Trump, in other words, is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He knows the files will incriminate him, so he has no choice but to stonewall any release. Yet the longer he stonewalls, the guiltier he looks.

This is one of the few times in the last decade that Trump has taken heat from both the left and right simultaneously. Even the legacy media is smelling blood in the water, though they’re bending over backward to give him the benefit of every possible doubt.

I am not the first to suggest that the Epstein scandal is a gift to Democrats, just in time for the midterms. It’s a golden opportunity to go negative, which is the only strategy that makes sense. If every commercial for every Democratic candidate calls out Trump over his sick bromance with Epstein, it won’t even matter if the files get released or not.

The idea is to chip away at the load-bearing lie until it collapses on itself. At which point, Trump’s own rubes might stop believing him altogether.