The Epstein files — truth, alternative facts, conspiracies and the further degradation of US politics

To prepare properly for braving the swamp of rumour, speculation and all the bog-standard conspiracy thinking swirling around the actions of the late Jeffrey Epstein and the still breathing Donald Trump, I’ve donned a hazmat suit, strapped on some fisherman’s waders and added a diver’s closed oxygen breathing apparatus to explore safely this very bigly dismal swamp.

In thinking about this piece, I realise I am not specifically looking for the ugly truths about Epstein's behaviour in his messy affairs. Rather, regardless of how all the pieces fit together in their sleaziness, what I want to explore here is what this epic scandal and typical Trump-style crisis says about the contemporary US political fever swamp. Trump already has, after all, had a lifetime of sex-related scandals trailing behind him, rather like an unrolled strip of toilet tissue stuck to his shoe as he walks along.

This Epstein/Trump scandal reminds me of one of my favourite novels, “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren. The book describes the epic rise and vertiginous fall of a politician from the Deep South who attains great political power but is brought down by the brother of a woman he has taken as his mistress. The story reveals the overlapping influences of political power, money, and sex, much like a real-life Venn diagram — and how it almost inevitably ends in tragedy.

This novel has spawned two film adaptations, featuring an extraordinary speech in which the protagonist, Willie Stark, first reveals his political genius. (Watch Broderick Crawford’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Stark here.)

To return directly to the Epstein/Trump scandal, even without digging into its moral depths, our question here is: What is it about this most recent conspiracy of silence that resonates with many Americans, and how does it fit into the larger tapestry of “conspiracism”? (A neologism first used in the 1980s, which fits perfectly with what we are dealing with here.)

In defining this particular madness, we start, beyond the late Epstein, with the willingness and even eagerness by some to embrace and even preach the gospel about scandals like this one, and all the tendrils that extend outward from it. Unlike some societies that may still cling to a more respectful approach towards politicians and leaders, there is and has long been a deep-seated presumption among many Americans that politicians lie. All of them; every single one of them. It is their genetic predisposition.

But that idea is simultaneously held in conjunction with another idea: that the real truth is out there, somewhere, hidden, but just barely discernible. There are courageous souls (QAnon, anyone?) who manage to uncover and then reveal this truth to the rest of us. Such people are real-life versions of those fictional characters Scully and Mulder from the long-running television series “The X-Files”.

Beyond that, there is also a view, similarly reflected in novels and films, along with “The X-Files”, that there really are conspiracies — deep, devastating ones — that truth-seekers and truth-tellers are determined to uncover and then reveal to the rest of us sheeple. The complication, of course, is that while much of this is just fevered nonsense, sometimes there really are conspiracies.

Back in the 1920s in the US there really was a Teapot Dome scandal that intertwined money and political influence and could have brought down a president, save for the fact that he conveniently died of food poisoning (or perhaps at the hand of a wife tired of his extramarital affair). Earlier, there really was a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln and other senior officials at the end of the Civil War. And, yes, there really was a conspiracy to assassinate the heir to the Habsburg dynasty in 1914, thus provoking the collapse of the tottering Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Watergate

Then, of course, there really was an organised conspiracy among senior officials to cover up their original crime of perpetuating the break-in of the Democratic Party campaign headquarters — and then subsequent, follow-on conspiracies to obscure their initial cover-up. Of course, in South Africa, what we call Guptagate (every scandal now gets the suffix “gate”, after the Watergate Hotel and offices where the Nixon-era break-in took place) was certainly real as well.

Events such as these make for fertile ground to nurture beliefs that conspiracies are real and commonplace, and that those who carry them out are secretly manipulating what we think we know about our world. We don’t even need The Matrix film franchise to convince us that secret manipulations of reality mask deeper truths.

In recent years, especially with the ascendancy of social media, alternative news channels and independent podcasters, the content is often about noxious conspiracies and cover-ups. Millions of people eagerly consume this faux information, precisely because they are preconditioned to suspend their critical faculties and embrace such ideas. That is tied together with an innate scepticism about government more generally that has become prevalent.

The historian Richard Hofstadter, back in 1964, wrote one of the most incisive essays on US political life in the then mighty Harpers magazine, defining “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, saying:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind … [but] the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Hofstadter concludes: “In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilise such energies…. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”

Operating concurrently with these phenomena, Trump and those associated with him have, for decades, practised making use of such ideas and techniques — and the purveying of those so-called alternative facts. Back in the 1980s, echoing the tutelage by his mentor, that “junkyard dog” of a lawyer, Roy Cohn, Trump campaigned for the prosecution of the “Central Park Five”, young men falsely accused of the gang rape of a young woman in a municipal swimming pool. His campaign played off the racial animosities of an angry, divided city.

Years later, as he prepped to campaign for election to the presidency, he hammered away at the lie that Barack Hussein Obama (the Hussein was always in there for obvious reasons) was born in Africa (and thus ineligible to serve as president); that Obama’s academic background was purposely obscured; and that there was a “deep state” trying to bring him down — that it was all a “witch hunt”. Later, when he lost his 2016 re-election bid, the result, according to Trump, was a hoax stemming from a fraudulent election. In the process, these constantly repeated charges further undermined support for any national understanding about governance.

Pizzagate

While Trump did not, himself, specifically purvey the truly mad notion that there was a gigantic conspiracy to kidnap young children and stash them in the basement of a well-known pizzeria in Washington, DC, for orgies and cannibalistic rites, his breaking down of the normal boundaries allowed this conspiracy theory to flourish like black mould in a damp basement. The ground has become very fertile for this kind of nonsense as the mechanisms and techniques have now been refined to reach millions and have become mutually reinforcing.

With the current Epstein tangle, Trump remains enmeshed in the scandal precisely because some of the facts of their long-term relationship are true — and are not alternative facts — and are not being denied. Trump and Epstein were buddies trawling the clubs in the 1980s, partying together, and embracing their public status as rich-as-Croesus young masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe would have described them. And then there were the women.

The darker side of Epstein’s financial success was almost a Ponzi scheme reliant upon onward recommendations by those in the know to others who wanted to participate in the fountain of wealth Epstein was presumably generating.

And the women were always there — and in Epstein’s case, in particular — his pursuit of women “on the younger side”, as Trump himself had said. In this, Epstein was abetted by his one-time girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, heir to the troubled publisher Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine is now serving a 20-year sentence for those efforts.

That Epstein died in prison in a highly monitored cell, apparently by his own hand, has fed the belief there is much more to the story — and there must be a mountain of evidence of his crimes and all those who participated in his devilish parties at his Manhattan townhouse or his private Caribbean island.

The Trump administration’s attorney-general, Pam Bondi, has only fuelled the frenzy, announcing she had a mountain of Epstein material on her desk, including an elusive Epstein client list (clients of both his brokerage and his parties), and then awkwardly backtracking from such claims, only asking that judges release transcripts of the grand jury hearing into Epstein’s activities. That client list has become a holy grail at the centre of a conspiracy keeping Epstein’s depredations under wraps and all his tainted friends (presumably mostly Democratic Party elites?) safe from suspicion and infamy.

Reshaping

But then, every time Trump has tried to extricate himself from the shadowy aspects of Epstein’s life, Trump has managed to muddy the waters. Most recently this came through reshaping the reason for the end of their relationship.

First, it had been smirking that Epstein had had the poor taste to pursue women who were under the age of consent; now he has alleged the real reason for their breakup was because Epstein “stole” some of the young women working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa.

Several things are immediately wrong with this newest picture. First of all, does Trump really want us to believe he knew the work histories of all of the hundreds of people working at that club? But there is also the astonishing argument that the young women concerned were somehow Trump’s property to be stolen. Involuntary servitude has been illegal in the country since 1865, even in Florida.

We are left with the complex response to the Trump/Epstein saga on the part of those who would otherwise take on board all of the conspiratorial thinking that helps underpin support for Trump from among his Maga followers.

As the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in The New York Times, just the other day, “The Epstein story is so sad, so sordid and so completely off the traditional ideological spectrum that it has escaped the bonds of our usual right-left divides. Instead, it seems to be bringing together unconventional allies who share only a distaste for the establishment and a heartfelt belief that elites get to play by a different set of rules in our society today. It is this through line, a skepticism of elites and institutions, more than anything ideological that ties the fans of someone like Mr. [Joe] Rogan to the political project of Mr. Trump, and I believe this is why the Epstein case is called out as a ‘line in the sand’ — as Mr. Rogan termed it — when Iran and immigration policies are not.

“As right and left converge in their skepticism and with institutions of all kinds experiencing high levels of bipartisan distrust, ‘nothing to see here; move along’ simply doesn’t cut it. Voters are hungry for transparency and accountability. Efforts to silence the calls to release the Epstein files have only focused more attention on the issue.”

Will voters and supporters come to decide that Trump himself was a willing part of the sordid enterprise of female exploitation by Epstein (and finally deserves the infamy that comes from that)? Or, will they accept the idea that Trump is being ensnared by that hoary old devil, the deep state, to protect the crimes of others who disagree with the incumbent president? Or, will they ultimately fall back on the idea that, well, okay, all politicians lie, all politicians behave badly and presume to be above the law, and that Trump misbehaved, but what can you do with men?

Whichever way the Epstein affair and Trump’s part in it comes to be embraced will inevitably come to degrade yet further any public respect for the country’s political process. If everyone is corrupt, then there are no real limits for behaviour. If only some people are held to account, then the privileged can get away with almost anything. And if every form of despicable behaviour must be punished, who will carry out such judgments?

That ancient Roman question, Who will guard the guardians?, takes on a new and yet more complex life in a world of instantaneous social media, niche broadcasting and public speech that is delivered without restraint by its speakers. Nihilism will run free. DM