If there’s anyone who deserves to be harassed by a conspiracy theory, it’s President Donald Trump. The man has been pushing them himself for decades, and now one of them has come back to bite him hard. The Epstein scandal is clearly driving him crazy, and he only has himself to blame.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which the president apparently believed to be under his control, subpoenaed the estate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, demanding they turn over all relevant papers to the committee, and on Monday they did just that. By Monday afternoon, at least two documents became public — and they were damning.
In a reprise from its July exclusive, which revealed a lewd drawing and letter attributed to Trump for a book of greetings compiled by Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell to mark his 50th birthday in 2003, the Wall Street Journal published the image itself. (Following the Journal’s original report, the president claimed it didn’t exist or was fake, and sued the paper for $10 billion.) On Monday, after the drawing was published, the caterwauling from the White House grew hysterical. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the signature did not match the president’s, despite the Journal providing plenty of examples from the period appearing to show it does.
The message is disturbing, intimating that the two men were very close, had a lot in common and shared “a wonderful secret” about how “enigmas never age.” Based on what we already know about Epstein, you don’t have to be a cryptanalyst to read between the lines. The lewd drawing appears to be of a budding young female, which only adds to the creepiness.
Trump was also mentioned in another of the book’s entries, which was apparently submitted by Joel Pashcow, a businessman and Mar-a-Lago member. The Journal reported that he “made a crude joke about a woman whom Epstein and Trump each courted in the 1990s, according to court testimony and people familiar with the matter.”
Pashcow’s letter was accompanied by “a photo of a posterboard-sized check for $22,500, which had been mocked up to appear that it was sent from Trump to Epstein. Beneath it, a caption said: ‘Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women sells “fully depreciated” [woman’s name] to Donald Trump for $22,500.’ The woman’s name is redacted in the image.”
“Fully depreciated” suggests that the woman got too old for (or was used up by) Epstein, so he passed her along to his pal Donald Trump. In light of what has been accused of, the joke about “selling” the woman seems particularly nasty.
As damning information like this continues to trickle out, it’s getting more difficult for the president to brush it off. But he continues to try.
In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s spin didn’t quite, well, spin. “The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false,” she wrote. “As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it. President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation.”
On Sept. 3, as the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged sex trafficking scheme held a powerful press conference on the steps of the Capitol, Trump said, “So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation [assassination], we gave them everything. Over and over again. More and more and more. And nobody’s ever satisfied… I think we’re probably having, according to what I read, even from two people in this room, we’re having the most successful eight months of any president ever and that’s what I want to talk about. That’s what we should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax.”
The survivors begged to differ. What they reportedly experienced remains all too real. They have pledged to keep up the pressure to release the documents, hold people accountable and force Congress to approve a discharge petition that would require the Justice Department to unseal the files.
The survivors begged to differ. What they reportedly experienced remains all too real. They have pledged to keep up the pressure to release the documents, hold people accountable and force representatives to sign a discharge petition that would require the Justice Department to unseal the files. (All House Democrats support the petition, as well as four Republicans, including Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Despite this support, the petition would still need two more signatures to pass.) Perhaps that’s why, on Friday night, Trump shared a lengthy Truth Social post accusing Democrats of having socialized with Epstein and, once again, calling it “another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia.”
Curiously, Trump was one of the first to bring up Epstein when he spoke at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference. Although his appearance came less than four months before he would announce his candidacy for president, he was already plotting how to go after Hillary Clinton, who was seen as the most likely Democratic nominee. Trump told Sean Hannity that Bill Clinton was a “nice guy but has a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein. Lot of problems.”
According to Vanity Fair, Trump’s buddy David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, had been pushing the Epstein story in his tabloid, and Trump saw a way to tar Hillary Clinton with it. This marked the first time anyone had used an association with Epstein for partisan purposes. Despite Trump’s own close friendship with the financier, which reportedly lasted well over a decade, he continued his attempts to link the Clintons to Epstein. Trump pushed the story so hard, in fact, that it took on a life of its own when QAnon, the MAGA conspiracy cult, which already believed the world is run by a rich and powerful cabal of pedophiles, saw his accusations as the ultimate proof of their theory. But now that Trump’s returned to power — and filled his Cabinet with many people who helped to stoke the conspiracy theory — he’s trying to shut it down. But many MAGA die-hards aren’t having it.
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Live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory. But long before Epstein, Trump had been working the levers of the tabloid scandal machine. This history meant he was uniquely suited for the right-wing swamp of the late aughts, which had been turbo-charged by email, blogs and, finally, social media, to spread rumors and lies more quickly than ever before. The man who started his career by being sued, along with his father, for racial discrimination, and demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five — who turned out to be innocent — became the perfect person to push the lie that Barack Obama, America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the U.S. It was that birther lie that put Trump on the political map and made him a hero of the right.
But it’s hardly the only conspiracy theory in which he indulged. The list is so long that it’s impossible to list them all here. We all know the big one, of course: That the 2020 election was stolen. But some other highlights include implying that: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, childhood vaccines cause autism, windmills cause cancer, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Obama staged the bin Laden killing, Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro, global warming is a Chinese hoax, Joe Biden didn’t really sign anything while he was president, Haitian immigrants eat cats and dogs, Paul Pelosi had a relationship with his attacker, the COVID death toll was far less than the official count, the Clintons killed Jeffrey Epstein (yes, both of them.) That’s just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of conspiracy theories the president has floated over the past decade or so.
But his main conspiracy is the one he keeps returning to time and again, the one he continues to use with everything Epstein: That it’s a hoax perpetuated by the Democrats. According to CNN, Trump used that term at least 250 times in 2020 alone, including one of his lowest moments, when he started the rumor that COVID was “their new hoax.” When he uttered that lie on Feb. 28, 2020, he set the stage for his followers to reject scientific recommendations and health guidelines, including vaccines, and to disbelieve the science going forward. As we saw last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vitriolic and falsehood-filled Senate committee hearing, we are still living with the repercussions of Trump’s science demagoguery today.
In April, the White House released an official statement called “100 Days of Hoaxes: Cutting Through the Fake News.” As it turns out, many of the links to the alleged “hoax” debunkings — “peddled by the usual suspects” like liberals and the mainstream media, it said — didn’t actually debunk the charges at all. One might even call them hoaxes themselves.
Trump may not win the Nobel Peace Prize for all the unnamed wars he claims to have ended. But if there’s a prize for lying, no one deserves it more than he does. He is the leading conspiracy theorist in the world today. No wonder QAnon loves him.
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