\n<\/p>\n
The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy\u2019s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,\u201d Donald Trump scolded a reporter who asked about Epstein in July. Trump went on to suggest that the question was a \u201cdesecration\u201d of the memory of those who had recently died in floods in the Texas Hill Country.<\/p>\n
It was a strangely aggressive reaction from the man whose most fervent supporters had spent years talking about Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison before his last trial, in which he faced charges for the trafficking of minors. (His associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex-trafficking charges.) During the 2024 campaign, Trump, when asked, pledged to release documents related to the investigation, commonly referred to as the \u201cEpstein files.\u201d A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump says he will release the Epstein client list if elected,\u201d the right-wing propagandist account Libs of TikTok wrote in September of 2024. \u201cThe Democrat elites are shaking rn.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, a year later, someone is certainly shaking.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, congressional lawmakers released thousands of emails from the Epstein estate. House Democrats highlighted three, including one in which Epstein told Maxwell that one of the women who accused him of abuse had \u201cspent hours at my house\u201d with Trump. \u201cOf course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,\u201d Epstein wrote in 2019 to the journalist Michael Wolff. In another email exchange between them, from 2015, Epstein was trying to game out how Trump might respond if asked by reporters about their relationship. \u201cI think you should let him hang himself,\u201d Wolff advised. Or \u201cyou can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.\u201d (There are yet more Epstein files that the Trump Justice Department is trying to keep under wraps; a House vote on the matter is coming next week.)<\/p>\n
Asked whether Trump had spent \u201chours\u201d at Epstein\u2019s home with one of his victims, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided an angry word salad that was missing the crucial ingredient: a denial.<\/p>\n
Trump is now calling the whole thing a \u201choax,\u201d his favorite term to communicate to his supporters that they should ignore any evidence of potential Trump wrongdoing. But he\u2019s been trying to hush his supporters up on Epstein for a while. In July, Trump posted a screed on Truth Social insisting that people should not \u201cwaste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.\u201d A few days later, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported on the existence of a signed birthday note for Epstein allegedly from Trump, which included Trump\u2019s familiar signature below an outline of a naked female figure. Trump sued the Journal<\/em> over the article, and right-wing media got the message: no more Epstein talk.<\/p>\n The Fox News host Jesse Watters went from accusing Democrats of \u201crunning interference for a dead pedophile\u201d to claiming that Democrats\u2019 calls to release the Epstein files were \u201cjust another political attack.\u201d The right-wing podcaster Michael Knowles said in September that the \u201cvast majority of\u201d Epstein victims were \u201cjust hookers threatening to reveal the names of their johns.\u201d As Matt Gertz wrote in July, mentions of Epstein on Fox News dwindled following Trump\u2019s demand.<\/p>\n Explaining what happened here is relatively easy. As long as conservatives believed that the Epstein files would provide a pretext for persecuting \u201cDemocrat elites,\u201d it was politically advantageous to speculate about who might be implicated or suggest that those people had Epstein killed. As soon as it became clear that Trump himself was in said files, all those right-wing media influencers, who had promised their audience a lib bloodbath, began to drop or downplay the issue. The DOJ\u2019s attempt to block the release of more files does not necessarily mean they contain a smoking gun or other damaging information; although Trump has an almost supernatural lack of shame, his overdeveloped sense of pride often motivates irrational and odd behavior. Nevertheless, what we already know about Trump\u2019s relationship with Epstein is disturbing.<\/p>\n When the emails were released on Wednesday, the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly insisted on some curious distinctions, saying about Epstein on her podcast, \u201cI\u2019m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I\u2019m just giving you facts, that he wasn\u2019t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.\u201d Well, as long as we\u2019re not making excuses!<\/p>\n The flip on Epstein reflects a consistent pattern. Some on the right have exploited the fear of and fascination with lurid sex crimes as a convenient pretext for persecuting LGBTQ people. For the past few years, some right-wing activists and politicians have relentlessly accused gay and trans people of \u201cgrooming\u201d children. That word usually refers to predators manipulating vulnerable victims in an attempt to abuse them, but in this context it\u2019s applied to people telling kids it\u2019s okay to be gay or trans. Fears of such \u201cgrooming\u201d have been used as a justification to push for discriminatory laws, ban art or literature featuring LGBTQ themes or by LGBTQ artists, and deny gender-affirming medical care to those who need it.<\/p>\n Conservatives did this even as they supported a candidate for president who was not only caught on audio bragging about sexual assault, but who was found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law, and who then proceeded to appoint Cabinet officials who were credibly accused of sexual assault or of covering it up. No one in the Trump administration has talked seriously about how America might reduce or prevent sexual violence through public policy\u2014if anything, the government is pushing policies that would make it easier to get away with abuse or harassment, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s promise to the military that there will be \u201cno more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations.\u201d One could argue, as a matter of opinion, that the #MeToo movement was overzealous; but as a factual matter it did not spare prominent Democrats and was concerned with preventing sexual assault and harassment across lines of party and ideology.<\/p>\n By contrast, the moment that documentation emerged of Trump\u2019s associations with Epstein, his defenders started drawing fine distinctions between different kinds of child sexual abuse, just in case. As long as sex crimes might justify rumormongering about a political rival, or a smear campaign against a marginalized group, right-wing media incessantly promoted conspiracy theories about the issue. But as soon as one of their own became implicated, they conveniently lost interest, or began minimizing Epstein\u2019s crimes.<\/p>\n \u201cRemember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring?\u201d future Vice President J. D. Vance posted on Twitter in 2021. \u201cAnd then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don\u2019t talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Well. Now I guess we know why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren\u2019t. \u201cAre you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy\u2019s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,\u201d Donald Trump scolded a reporter who asked about Epstein in July. Trump went on to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[11590,7934,1059],"class_list":{"0":"post-33521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cried","9":"tag-hoax","10":"tag-president"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}