Donald Trump is reportedly in the Epstein files.
To anyone paying attention, it’s less a revelation than a grim confirmation. And now — the big question: is this the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s political career?
It all started after Attorney General Pam Bondi came up empty-handed following the long-hyped release of the Epstein files, the promised reckoning fell flat. For all the buildup, the documents were scant. The smoking gun absent. And the ensuing reaction had all the hallmarks of a terminally splintering movement.
The podcast bros in the manosphere turned sour.
Photographs and video footage of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein standing and laughing together looped on TV like it was the moon landing.
And all Trump could manage, in the initial phase of the scandal, was the feeblest and most suspect of responses: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years … Are people still talking about this guy?”
They were. In fact, it was all anyone in the MAGA world could talk about.
And who could blame them? Not only was their movement engulfed in the moral contradiction of President Trump, but their entire belief system had been turned inside out. Because the man they sent to fix the rot at the heart of American democracy was seated beneath it the whole time.
Given this moral whiplash and cognitive dissonance, people believed it was the death knell.
They were incorrect.
Don’t get me wrong — Trump is thoroughly bruised from this. But he is far from beaten.
There’s no question this scandal and the lurid facts still buried in the Epstein files, will continue to dog him. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s committed a crime, but it is certainly an unmitigated political disaster, if true.
But the more important takeaway — the one that will shape how this all plays out — has less to do with the scandal itself and everything to do with the nature of Trump’s response. It underscores a deeper truth about the MAGA political machine: it isn’t vulnerable to conspiracy — it is built on it. And therefore, Trump is always playing with a loaded deck.
When the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump had sent Epstein a birthday letter allegedly featuring a “bawdy” sketch of a naked woman, Trump didn’t go quiet. He went nuclear — suing the Journal for $10 billion.
It was textbook Trump: when under siege, go on the attack. Distract. Flood the zone. And so, his response followed a familiar pattern — reframe damning news not as fact, but as partisan sabotage. It energizes the base. It forces a test of loyalty: “Believe me, or believe them.”
The result? Legal peril becomes persecution. Indictments become proof he’s feared by the elite and therefore generate political capital. And even criticism from ideological allies becomes ammunition in his insurgent identity.
Trump knows how to alchemize scandal into grievance — and grievance into power.
But those are just the tactics. The more revealing question is: why do they work?
The answer is that conspiracy is no longer a fringe impulse in American politics — it’s foundational. According to polling, over 50 per cent of American adults believe in at least one conspiracy theory. And Trump understands that better than anyone.
The most durable trait of conspiracy thinking is its elasticity. It adapts. It never stops moving. The target shifts. The logic recalibrates.
If the messiah doesn’t show up in a spacecraft on the day of the rapture, it’s not because the prophecy was false. It’s because she changed her mind at the last minute.
Trump doesn’t just exploit this tendency — he embodies it. He is its avatar.
And so, if you believed there was a deep-state cabal orchestrated by Epstein, or that the CIA was gathering kompromat on the powerful, it’s not a stretch to believe Trump’s association with Epstein could be nothing more than a frame job. That he was the dupe. Or even the decoy.
Because the belief isn’t just in a conspiracy — it’s in conspiracy itself. An omnipresent, unknowable force is always working in shadows. And within that framework, Trump isn’t a hypocrite. He’s a martyr.
Even his latest attack at President Obama — amplifying a debunked claim about a coup in the wake of the 2016 campaign — points to the same playbook: inject doubt, deepen paranoia, expand the conspiracy.
Distraction is the game. Division is the strategy. And Trump is still playing from the same old loaded deck.
