The most entertaining part of the Trump-versus-Epstein conspiracy is that it’s ensnared the U.S. president in his own make-believe, never-happened, deny-it-unto-death world, and it’s hard to escape a world you invented and exist at the centre of.
Trump says he didn’t author the crude, lewd and sophomoric birthday
included in a packet of similar greetings presented to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th birthday in 2003. He’s
the Wall Street Journal for reporting the existence of the letter after he warned them not to and told them he didn’t write it.
Is he telling the truth? Does it make any difference? Over a decade as president, past president and president again, Trump has firmly established that, to him, truth doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know the truth. He doesn’t use the truth. He doesn’t accept the truth as true. He doesn’t give any indication he sees any reason he should.
It’s been an essential part of his identity since Day One. Advisor Kellyanne Conway set the bar in his first administration with her declaration that MAGA world owned its own set of “alternative” facts and would deploy them as it saw fit. Entire data banks have been established to collect and store the falsehoods he’s tossed about with unrestrained abandon. Big ones and small ones. The crowds at his first inauguration were bigger than Obama’s, who by the way was born in Kenya. He didn’t lose the 2020 election. The attack on Congress wasn’t a riot; the insurrectionists calling for his vice-president’s head did nothing wrong.
He disremembers inconvenient happenings. The 2020 U.S-Mexico-Canada trade pact was utterly unfair to Americans, though
and he’s the greatest deal-maker in the history of the world. Jerome Powell is a terrible Federal Reserve chairman and Joe Biden should be ashamed of appointing him, except Biden didn’t appoint him —
and there’s
of him declaring his pleasure in doing do.
Truth to Trump is what he wants it to be at any given moment. He named his personal internet megaphone Truth Social and invents the content as he goes along. Among the challenges Trump represents to the world is how to cooperate with a leader who rejects today what he asserted yesterday and may not abide by tomorrow. The very essence of the man is that nothing he says can be trusted.
None of this mattered much to the White House until now because MAGA world bought whatever he was selling, and a subservient Republican Congress bowed and scraped obediently to whatever was expected. But MAGA is a movement founded on conspiracy theories and it absolutely believes there’s a conspiracy going on over the Epstein files. So if Trump doesn’t comply with its demands for full details of the conspiracy, he must be part of the conspiracy.
This puts the president in the very position in which he so enjoys trapping others. He once promised to release the Epstein files. Then he said there’s nothing worth releasing. Now he says he’s
of the files
he said aren’t worth releasing.
Is he telling the truth, or is he part of a coverup? That’s hard to gauge, as you’d first have to establish which of his contradictory positions the question pertains to. And the one thing about a conspiracy is that denying you’re part of one only feeds suspicions that you’re lying.
So there’s no easy escape for Trump and it’s driving him batty. He dedicates entire head-spinning diatribes to the unfairness of his devoted followers wasting their time on
Epstein, Epstein and more Epstein
when they should be focusing on other issues, like whether
is switching to cane sugar like he says it is. (It probably isn’t).
It was entirely predictable that he’d launch a suit against the Journal after successfully extracting a
from CBS and parent company Paramount Global over a 60 Minutes interview with former vice-president Kamala Harris. It’s reasonable to assume Paramount caved rather than risk Trump using his position to complicate a planned merger with Skydance Media, and saw US$16 million as a small price to pay. Journal owner Rupert Murdoch’s news and entertainment empire has at least as much at stake in its U.S. operations but evidently concluded the Epstein story is just too juicy to resist, scandal having been the lifeblood of Murdoch’s fortune.
Murdoch’s Fox News, a fiercely dedicated Trump admirer, paid
to settle a suit for cheerleading fake claims of ballot box fraud in the 2020 election, and shuttered one of its oldest and widely-read UK publications over a
so the Australian billionaire fully understands the potential cost of titillating journalism.
But what the heck? Murdoch can afford it, and fun is fun. The Journal may well have calculated a court fight would force more explicit Epstein details into the light — as happened with Trump’s lost sex abuse battle against author E. Jean Carroll — and the chance to watch Trump squirm was well worth the price.
National Post
