It’s nearly impossible to know which end is up in the sordid tale of Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile rapist who died, allegedly by suicide, in New York in 2019. Despite being a college dropout, Epstein had a charmed career as a financier and influential socialite and seemed to have known everyone who had any kind of wealth (particularly in New York and Silicon Valley), or power (particularly in the U.S. and Israeli government and intelligence services).

There are many theories about what Epstein was really up to. Alex Jones of InfoWars and former CIA agent John Kiriakou think he was working for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. The former State Department official and researcher Mike Benz thinks he was primarily a freelance “financial facilitator” who worked with various intelligence agencies to “advance activities that the U.S. government wants done but does not want to be seen as brokering.”

The theory I like best is Naomi Wolf’s, that Epstein was a sort of networking and funding liaison between intelligence agencies and the high-tech and scientific elite, who also ran a pedophile blackmail ring on the side. Some of the wealthy high-tech elites got ensnared in this ring; some didn’t, but Wolf speculates that President Trump is covering up the release of these names because all of these extremely powerful people, many of whom are Trump campaign donors, will be tainted by association.

Very few people accepted the announcement by the U.S. Justice Department on July 7 that a systematic review of its “significant amount” of physical and digital evidence in the Epstein case

revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.

This nondisclosure was a shock to Trump supporters, who had been promised during his campaign that Epstein’s list would be released, and who were teased by further promises by Attorney General Pam Bondi following Trump’s inauguration. Bondi had even gone so far as to say in February that Epstein’s client list “is sitting on my desk right now.” The Justice Department’s statement that there was nothing in the Epstein files was hard to believe given that the flight logs of Epstein’s airplane (known as the “Lolita Express,” after Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel about a pedophile) had revealed that many prominent politicians and celebrities flew on it, including President Bill Clinton and Trump himself.

Of course, just because Trump flew on Epstein’s plane doesn’t mean that he was caught up in Epstein’s pedophilic activities. Given that Democrats threw a kitchen sink of spurious and mostly ineffective lawsuits at Trump when the Biden administration had control of the Justice Department, they certainly would have used anything incriminating against Trump in the Epstein files, if there was anything.

Yet the president didn’t inspire confidence among his supporters when he ridiculed them for not dropping the Epstein story on command. The day after the Justice Department release, Trump berated a reporter for asking Bondi about Epstein during a cabinet meeting. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump asked, incredulously. “Are people still talking about this creep? That is unbelievable.”

It’s an understatement to say that Trump’s base was dissatisfied with the president’s abrupt dismissal of one of the most scandalous cases of the systematic rape of underage girls by the wealthy and powerful. At a Turning Point USA conference, the weekend after the Justice Department release, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked the crowd of Trump supporters to clap if they were satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation. The hall filled with a chorus of boos.

Increasingly frustrated, Trump continued to try to move past the Epstein story, calling it a “Democrat hoax” and even denouncing his own followers on his TruthSocial platform, saying that he didn’t want their support if they continued to focus on the Epstein investigation:

Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. … Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

That July 16 post on TruthSocial was ratio’ed, a first for Trump. (Getting ratio’ed means that the responses from users criticizing a post got more up-votes than the message itself.) This is particularly remarkable, given that TruthSocial is Trump’s own social media platform, and its user base consists of his most ardent supporters.

The same day, a Quinnipiac University poll of national voters showed that only 17 percent approved of the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, with 63 percent disapproving. In the same poll, more respondents said they would consider joining a third party as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties (49 percent said they would, versus 45 percent who said they wouldn’t). In the RealClear Politics average of all presidential job approval polls, Trump’s unfavorability among voters widened in the days following the Justice Department’s July 7 release, to a negative 5.3 percentage-point spread from negative 3.3 percentage-point spread before the release.

Most of the media personalities who have always supported Trump stuck by him even when they disagreed with some of his decisions are not on board with the president this time. Ironically, some of the original NeverTrumper media personalities, men like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, are among the few telling their listeners to listen to the president and forget about the Epstein story.

Speaking on The Tucker Carlson Show on July 17, the independent historian Darryl Cooper hit the nail on the head with his description of why Epstein is so important to the people who have stuck with Trump through thick and thin:

The reason this is important to the base is not because there is this Jewish pedophile who worked for the Israeli Mossad—it has nothing to do with that. It’s a proxy for, ‘Can we hold these people accountable?’ Donald Trump’s presidency in general, you know, people might have favored the trade policy, immigration was important—all that kind of stuff, but really what it was is, these people have gotten so out of control and so out of touch with the rest of us and so unconcerned with what is going on with the rest of us, we have just got to bring in a wrecking ball from the outside who is going to shake things up and tear this thing down.

Trump appeared to finally buckle under public pressure late on July 17. “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval,” the president posted on TruthSocial. “This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”

Let’s hope that this means that the people who exploited children with Jeffrey Epstein are finally revealed and held accountable, both for the president’s falling poll numbers and next year’s midterm elections, but more importantly, so that justice is done.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/magas-epstein-crisis