
Opinion | Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn’t Going to Hurt Trump
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Opinion | Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn’t Going to Hurt Trump
Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or insane, but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth. For many Americans, such stories have far more explanatory power than, say, a primer on neoliberalism by Wolfgang Streeck. Most Democrats, for example, did not really believe that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent, and they stopped indulging that fantasy once Joe Biden was in power. They were sophisticated enough to understand that such stories are a shorthand for the ill-defined malfeasance of their real or perceived enemies.
Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or insane but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth, for expressing aspirations, anxieties and feelings of hopelessness in the face of vast structural forces that would otherwise resist deliberation. In the case of Mr. Epstein, these theories — that he used his sex ring to blackmail politicians and other powerful people, that he was an Israeli intelligence operative — reflect a widely shared sense of elite betrayal and institutional inertia. For many Americans, such stories have far more explanatory power than, say, a primer on neoliberalism by Wolfgang Streeck.
Our public life is hopelessly saturated with these displaced “truths,” but they are more like useful metaphors than factual claims. As a result — and this is the second overlooked feature of conspiracy theories — they can lose their utility and their salience once their purveyors or those who benefit from their dissemination obtain power. They are frictionless fictions, and they can be readily discarded, often without major political cost.
Most Democrats, for example, did not really believe that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent, and they stopped indulging that fantasy once Joe Biden was in power. They were sophisticated enough to understand, at least implicitly, that such stories are a shorthand for the ill-defined malfeasance of their real or perceived enemies.
Even for the handful of true believers who cling tightly to conspiracy theories — and the MAGA movement may overindex here — their thinking is endlessly malleable. When your convictions are invulnerable to falsification, signs are always taken for wonders. In some circles, Mr. Trump’s very disavowal of the Epstein theory will become evidence not of his betrayal but that he is somehow pursuing the guilty more assiduously than ever. “They” may have gotten to him for now, but you can be sure he is playing a deeper game.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/trump-epstein-list-suicide.html