Epstein? Seriously?

Political leaders with any sort of pretensions to radicalism have twin pitfalls that they need to avoid: going further than their followers will tolerate, and not going far enough. It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially because the followers are usually not a monolithic group: some are always looking for more radicalism while others are keen to put on the brakes.

Donald Trump is someone who needs to maintain the support of two very different sets of followers: the mainstream Republican voters and politicians who put him in power, and the hard core movement, usually labelled MAGA (for “Make America Great Again”), that is devoted to him personally rather than the party. The first would like him to tone down his excesses and govern more like a normal Republican; the latter has nothing but contempt for normal Republicans and the exigencies of actual governing.

The question of what it would take for the former group, the mainstream Republicans, to abandon Trump has been a pressing one for almost a decade. Here, for example, are my thoughts on the subject from October 2019, when he was facing his first impeachment:

[I]f Trump’s party does abandon him, it will probably happen suddenly; a line of some sort will be crossed, and the ground under the president will fall away quickly. So perhaps it’s in the nature of the case that we can’t see the line in advance. But it could also be because it just isn’t there, and this Republican Party in reality will follow Trump anywhere.

But the loyalty of the second group, the MAGA enthusiasts, hasn’t had as much consideration. Most people (including me) seemed to have assumed that its devotion to Trump was unshakeable; that it was a cult, and a cult is simply defined by loyalty to the leader. And MAGA certainly behaved that way, sticking with the leader through all the ups and downs of the last ten years.

Until now, perhaps. For the last fortnight, Trump has been subject to a barrage of criticism for his handling of, of all things, the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker, committed suicide in prison in 2019, and has since become an almost mythological figure for his alleged role in facilitating child abuse by the rich and powerful.*

Moral panic about child molestation isn’t new – the satanic child abuse scandals of the 1980s claimed hundreds of innocent victims – and there’s no doubt that Epstein was genuinely involved in the sexual abuse of underage girls. (How many of them were actually “children” in the ordinary sense is uncertain.) But in recent years it’s become an article of faith on the far right of politics that this sort of abuse is rampant among the establishment and that left-of-centre politicians are all either child molesters themselves or at least part of a conspiracy to shield it.

Trump did not originate this conspiracy theory, but he has shamelessly pandered to it as he has to many others. So now that he is back in power, his hard-core supporters expected him to release the “Epstein files”, exposing the conspiracy and naming all the child molesters among their (and his) political opponents.

But the demands of government have obliged Trump to embrace a certain minimum of rationality. (We’ve seen in other fields the way that elements of good sense have been finding their way into his pronouncements.) So it’s now fallen to him and to his attorney-general, Pam Bondi, to tell MAGA the bad news: that there is no conspiracy, that Epstein wasn’t murdered but committed suicide just as reported, and that there is no “client list” or other salacious material to release.

Being Trump, of course, he added a large helping of bluster and hyperbole to the message – mostly directed against the Democrats, but including some serves for his own supporters, whom he described (with perfect accuracy) as having “bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” adding that “They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will.”

The cultists are not happy. Adding fuel to their fury is the fact that Trump himself had crossed paths with Epstein many years ago, so of course his name, like thousands of others, is mentioned somewhere in the voluminous materials from the Epstein investigation. So now it’s Trump being accused of running a cover-up; from MAGA’s point of view he has become part of the “deep state”, protecting himself and his criminal confederates.

The word “karma” comes to mind, as it often does when dishonest leaders are overtaken by their lunatic followers. Mike Wendling at the BBC sums it up nicely: “Conspiratorial thinking has been a part of President Trump’s movement from the outset. … Now, however, the world of conspiracy is biting back.” And in the words of political scientist Matt Dallek (quoted by the ABC), “it is hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”

How much political damage this will do is unclear. Mainstream voters are unlikely to care much about what the conspiracy theorists think for its own sake, but the fact that a previously solid support base has developed fractures must dent the administration’s image to some extent. Mud sticks, even weird paranoid mud. And Trump’s more conventional opponents, even if they resist the temptation to pander to the conspiracists themselves, will find plenty of useful material in the controversy.

Nor are all supporters readily classifiable as either MAGA or mainstream; some straddle the divide, including Rupert Murdoch, head of Fox News and hitherto a vital Trump ally. While he has pretensions to respectability, Murdoch’s profits depend on catering to the crazies, so sure enough, last week his Wall Street Journal put a toe in the water of promoting the conspiracy narrative. Trump responded with a lawsuit for defamation, claiming damages of $10 billion.

With any luck, the fun is only just beginning.

.

* A note on terminology: much of the media coverage refers to “pedophiles” and “pedophilia”, but this is incorrect. Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children; not all pedophiles act on their desires and molest children, and many people who do molest children do so for reasons other than sexual attraction. “Child molesting” and “child sexual abuse” are therefore preferable terms.