Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

There’s this old joke: A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. When he gets to the pearly gates, God says: Welcome. You can ask me one question. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. The guy says: I have to know — who really killed J.F.K.? God says it was Lee Harvey Oswald, and he acted alone. The man pauses for a moment and looks up and says: Wow. This goes even higher than I thought. New details this morning in the case of Jeffrey Epstein. A review from the Justice Department and F.B.I. did not find any evidence that notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein kept a so-called client list. An unsigned memo that rules out any smoking gun. That review found, in short, nothing. No client list, no evidence of blackmail, no evidence of foul play in Epstein’s death. The memo goes on to explain why further files will not be released by the Trump administration. Information related to Epstein’s victims is “intertwined throughout the materials.” It says: “One of our highest priorities is combating child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.” So, I guess, case closed. Nah, I’m just kidding. MAGA is tearing itself apart over this. How many of you are not satisfied with the results of the investigation? People are absolutely not going to accept just a memo that was written that says there is no client list. I’ve got to be honest, I blame Pam Bondi. To me — to me, her days are numbered. 100 percent Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein. This guy’s been talked about for years. New theories are spinning out to try to explain it all. Maybe Donald Trump is on the list. Maybe Donald Trump or his administration is being blackmailed by the intelligence services. Maybe Donald Trump is now himself using that list to blackmail others. Maybe it’s all part of the plan. Or maybe there was no list. Maybe MAGA’s elite were always playing their followers for fools. The juicing of the Epstein conspiracy, the promise that there was this list and it would be released, was not a small project confined to a few outliers in the movement. This one went right to the top. Release the list. Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing. MAGA has a cosmology. It has a mythology. There is a corrupt elite — in the most extreme forms, it is a corrupt, pedophilic elite — and that elite controls everything. And Donald Trump as a person, MAGA as a movement. Are justified in doing anything they need to do to break that elite’s control and return this country to the people. There’s a problem that movements like this face when they take power. What happens when the conspiracy isn’t there? What happens when you declassify the files and there’s nothing in them? What happens if you read the files and you realize that there’s some reason you can’t release them? What happens when you become the system? What happens when you become the corrupt elite? Because here is the thing: Donald Trump is a corrupt elite. He is now — he always has been — selling out the people who believe in him. Liberals always want to make this point in the framework we have of the world, and the way we see him selling people out. Here’s my version of it, or one of them. Trump is a champion right now of people who are heavily dependent on Medicaid, on food assistance. He just absolutely screwed them. He cut about $1 trillion in Medicaid and food assistance to finance what? Tax cuts for him and his rich friends. He did that while saying publicly, denying that he was cutting Medicaid, lying to the people who believed in him. In my framework of the world, that’s corruption. That is what the worst elites do when they get power. They take money from people who need it and line their own pockets. But that’s not how the cosmology of MAGA works. His hardest-core supporters had a story about what the problem was. And that story wasn’t in the tax code or the safety net. For them, the problem was a conspiracy that reached to the highest levels of the American government. And then Trump appointed people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to office people who’d been spreading and giving attention to those theories for years. You don’t think that Bill Gates is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list? There’s a big assumption out there that these videotapes were exclusively in the custody of Epstein. That’s a huge mistake. By elevating Patel and Bongino, The message was Trump knew what the problem was, too, and he was going to fix it. And then he didn’t fix it. And now he’s lashing out at his own supporters for believing a story that he and the people around him were perfectly happy to promote when it served their interests. Now he’s telling those supporters: It’s just the radical left telling you this. They want to talk about the Epstein hoax. And the sad part is it’s people that are really doing the Democrats’ work. They’re stupid people. I think I should say, before I start this episode, where I am on the Epstein story. If you force me to give you my best guess, given what we know, I think this guy had a lot of very powerful friends. I think this guy was a predator and a pedophile on an extraordinary scale. And I think those sides of his life were mostly separate. I don’t think there is a list of boldfaced names somewhere. The reason I don’t think there’s a list is there’s been a lot of big law firms hunting for cases here. There is a lot of money to be made in suing anyone connected to Epstein. Very, very powerful firms to say nothing of big media organizations, firms and organizations that have the money to hire the best investigators, the best journalists, they’re just not finding it. Does that explain everything? No. Does it resolve everything? No. Does the plea deal Epstein got in Florida look weirdly sweet? Yeah it does. Does Epstein’s death seem weird to me? It does. There is a remainder, a remnant, that will probably never be resolved here. We will never get satisfaction. But I don’t find it easy to resolve that remnant in a conspiracy so total that no government, no law firm, no media organization seems able to breach it. But what MAGA wanted out of the Epstein case wasn’t just answers. It was the same thing it wanted out of QAnon, a story that collapsed reality down to something that is well ordered. A world where the problems resolve down to a few villains. A world where someone is in charge. And maybe that someone right now is evil. But if you could find them, expose them, replace them with someone good, then we would finally be able to fix all of this. What is the fantasy of Donald Trump, if not that? “I alone can fix it.” But now Donald Trump is pitting himself against that fantasy. The reason the fizzling of the Epstein cases mattered in MAGA is that it does something worse than undermine a conspiracy theory. It undermines a worldview. I want to talk about that worldview, and how it has been consistent. How it has animated MAGA for years now. My guest today is Will Sommer, who has been tracking conspiracies for a long time. He was a reporter at The Washington Post. He’s now at The Bulwark, and he’s the author of the book “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.” Will Sommer, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So I want to begin in the dominant conspiracy theory of Donald Trump’s first term. What, for the uninitiated, was qanon? Sure so QAnon in a nutshell, is this idea that Donald Trump was recruited by the military to take on this pedophile cabal that runs the world, or what. We might also call it the deep state. And Trump supporters got this idea because of someone named q who was posting online starting in late 2017 with these kind of cryptic messages, and then they would decode them. And that’s really what formed the basis of QAnon, to the extent QAnon developed a fully fleshed out mythology. Tell me what that story was, who was in it. I mean, what did a what did a serious QAnon believer by late 2020 believe was going on. So they believe QAnon believers. They believe, basically, that the world is full of symbols and horrors that they can decode. And what they come to believe is that powerful elites sexually abuse and murder children in satanic rituals, and they drink their blood, or the substance called adrenochrome to stay, that they kind of that exists, but not in the way they think it does, that they believe is a fountain of youth. And so that people with talk shows or bankers and celebrities, they are just regularly drinking children’s blood to stay young forever. And so QAnon, needless to say, had become very complex and Baroque. But they also believed just really random, crazy things like they believed that the government was controlling the weather through chemtrails clouds in the sky where they believed that if a celebrity wore red shoes, relatively common color of shoe, that was a symbol that they drink children’s blood. So there was this whole universe of beliefs that they had about nefarious things that the cabal had done. When you say it like that, it sounds a little hard to believe. It does, it does. So what gave it its power. Why was it believed. I think there were a couple of things. I think the idea of people nefariously abusing children, in the dead of night or an organization of people. I mean, it goes back to the Middle Ages when people would say that Jews were murdering children to for Passover or the Satanic Panic in the 80s. The idea that there were just these satanic cabals across the country, I think it is just so emotionally powerful. I think all kind of right thinking people are really offended by the idea of children being abused. And I think a lot of Trump supporters had really put an enormous amount of faith in Trump that he would change their lives really materially. And then when QAnon appears in about 9 months into the first Trump administration, they aren’t getting a lot of what they wanted. I mean, he’s bogged down in the Mueller investigation. The wall hasn’t been built. Hillary Clinton hasn’t been locked up. And so then suddenly q shows up and says, well, actually, Hillary Clinton’s going to be arrested by the end of the month, and Trump is not. It might seem like he’s kind of bogged down in Washington morass, but really, he’s at war with this essentially satanic forces. And when he wins, you’re going to own your apartment for free. Your car loan is going to be canceled, diseases are going to be cured. So you can see. And there were other things. There were religious elements, a lot of stuff that kind of matched up with what was going on at Fox News at the time. And so I think there was a lot of Appeal to people. And plus it was so it was kind of a game, there was a community of people decoding the clues together. I also think one a dimension of both QAnon and then and then Epstein, which has more texture of reality to it, is that if you think back over the past few decades, there are a huge number of sexual abuse scandals that really did have cover UPS. They really did exist in forms of common and elite knowledge that really were grotesque. I mean, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal. More recently, we have the ditty parties that on the one hand, QAnon has this outlandishness to it. And on the other hand, when you think over this period, there actually is a recurrent pattern of networks of powerful people, or at least individual powerful people abusing women usually. Although in the Catholic Church scandal it wasn’t only women. And it’s not just covering it up. But it being known by other powerful people who did nothing about it. The idea that you cannot trust the elites to police this. There is truth to that. I think that is why in these scandals, these sexual abuse cover UPS is part of why QAnon is so powerful and resonate with people because people see something true in it and something that is really real. And so from my perspective, talking to QAnon people, I often feel silly saying like, do you really think an institution would cover up sexual abuse to protect itself or to avoid embarrassment. Even at the cost more children and more women being abused. I mean, we know that does happen. And so in a way that I think if you just said there’s a cabal and it’s putting in green energy or it’s offshoring jobs or it’s keeping taxes, high, I think a lot of people, particularly the often of apolitical people that were activated by QAnon, and they wouldn’t care, understandably. But when you say that the absolute worst things are happening that you can imagine and those people are going to get away with it. And they rule over you, I think that really resonates people. I want to hold on. Something you said in there that after this satanic pedophile cabal is arrested, maybe your rent will go away. Maybe your disease will be cured. There’s a version where there isn’t a lot of political import to this, that there’s a terrible crime happening and it needs to be stopped. And the final step in the stopping of it is the arresting of all these the arrest of all these child molesters. But there’s a politics to cue a sense that on the other side of it lies something for you, the Normie or normal or average reader of a-chan, the average MAGA supporter. Explain that part of it. Yeah, I’m glad you pointed that out, because that is of the utopian or messianic aspects of QAnon, I think, were often underplayed at the time. There was a moment in QAnon that they thought would happen, called the storm, and that would be the day, all this awful stuff that we in the world, the pedophile cabals, all this stuff. And then there would be a moment called the storm, where Trump would arrest and presumably execute everyone. Conservatives didn’t like. I mean, it would be people in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood, in banking, people like Tom Hanks and Oprah would be sent to Guantanamo Bay for military tribunals. And so then after that, for everyone left behind. Life would be pretty sweet. They believed that this cabal was responsible for all the evil in the world, all the wars it was holding back, all the cures for all the diseases. And as you mentioned, that basically the cabal created the concept of debt. And you might say, who would really believe this stuff. But we know that on January 6, Ashli Babbitt, who died that day, she thought that day was the storm. There was a guy who was part of the mob who had just bought a new car, and someone said, how can you afford that. And he said, don’t worry, the storm’s almost here. Qanon, I think, was powerful because in part, it offered people excuses or some relief in their lives that the system or the economy or the government wasn’t giving them. In your book, you talk about meeting a QAnon believer who had terminal cancer. I think it was at a rally. Can you tell me that story. Absolutely I mean, this is someone who at one of the first QAnon rallies I went to he said, I have terminal cancer and I’m too poor to afford or excuse me, I should say, he said, I have cancer and I’m too poor to afford the treatments for it. And in all likelihood, it will kill me relatively soon. But the good news is that because Trump is going to bring on the storm, he’s going to take down this cabal that’s been holding back the cure for cancer. And soon enough, I’ll be back in action. And my cancer will be cured. And so in that way I saw a woman who said, my child has an intellectual disability. He’s getting mistreated in school, but the cabal is holding back the cure for autism, and Trump’s going to find it. And so it really reached into people’s hearts and really in places where they were most vulnerable and offered them something when you met these people. If I ask you, what were they like. I mean, they’re different people, but what were they like. Yeah I mean, I think what would surprise people about QAnon believers is that they I think we’re used to the q shaman, the guy in the paint and the horns are like the January 6 mob and these people who just look like lunatics, but often they were otherwise totally normal people and very affable. They were totally happy to talk with me about QAnon. I mean, there was a woman I interviewed before the riot really started at January 6, who was totally nice and said, well, I’m here in DC for January 6, and also I’ll be going up to Comet Pinkfong to see the underground child tunnels that I believe exist there. Very nice person. And then she then went and caught a criminal charge for her role in the riot. So there is a way that these people, were they exist in the world, they have jobs, but they also just have this, I mean, frankly, a derangement, or they exist in another reality. At its peak, how big was qanon? How many people are we talking about believing in some version of this conspiracy So there has been some polling on this, and one that struck out to me was a 2020, excuse me. It was a 2021 poll by prri, which found that 16 percent of people, of Americans believe that there is a pedophile cabal that runs the world, and 22 percent believe that the storm is coming. That is a huge number of people. Well, when you hear polls like that, do you how literally do you take them. Because I sometimes wonder about being called by a pollster, as a random person do you believe there’s a satanic pedophile cult running the world. Like, yeah, I don’t really want to be talking to this person. Sure I believe I never know if I should really believe that. Almost one out of five of the people I met believed that in a real way, or they’re signaling or having fun or not thinking about it. Yeah, I think in my head I kind of subtract a couple points from the higher numbers and say, perhaps these are people who what does the storm mean to them. Or maybe they’re liberals who believe that Donald Trump runs the pedophile cabal or that don’t really fit into the QAnon framework. But I do think, really rigorous things that have said, are you a QAnon believer, have found, a couple percentage points of people. So QAnon begins on very esoteric online message boards. It migrates to social media. But for a while, we’re mostly talking about random people on the internet stumbling on this thing and getting involved in this strange subculture. But tell me about the way it begins to get picked up by influential people, notable people in the MAGA or right wing influencer movement. Sure I mean, it is the power of QAnon, I think, is that it grew from such a small point. A couple of posts on Fortune that people initially were saying, this is ridiculous. Even the people there discounted them. But then it because I think it reached an emotional resonance with people. It starts growing. As you said, it gets on YouTube where someone like Roseanne Barr or the former baseball player Curt Schilling picks it up, and from there, it keeps growing. You have people picking up the ideas. Alex Jones at InfoWars, who’s obviously a huge vector in a kind of a crossover moment between conspiracy theorists and the broader MAGA movement. He starts getting into it. He starts interviewing like the QAnon experts who are talking about how great it is. So QAnon is bubbling, and it gets a big boost in 2019 from the death of Jeffrey Epstein. But then it really with the pandemic, you can look at it and you can see all of these conditions that would lead a conspiracy theory to get really big. People are at home a lot more, so they have more time on the internet. People are understandably very frustrated with the state of the world, and they want answers. And one of the things that is offering answers is the world of QAnon. The pandemic is a moment the writer Anna merlan, has called this conspiracy singularity. The things begin to Cohere into one overwhelming set of ideas. And as you said, I mean the elites. The government is reaching into your life in a way, a direct way that it probably was not in the past. Your kids’ school is closed, you may have lost your job or you have to wear a mask. And so in this way, I think it bred a lot of anger at the government and elites. And people say, and then QAnon says, well, that Doctor Fauci guy, he’s just not maybe a busybody to you. He’s actually part of a very sinister group. And this isn’t just kind of a thing that happened to us that we all have to live through. There are these specific people who caused it, and we can go get them. One thing that began happening with QAnon is that not just influencers, but Donald Trump himself began sending signals that he was hearing them, that maybe he agreed with them, that maybe this was true. How would you describe that relationship between Trump himself and qanon? Sure So for QAnon believers, acknowledgment from Trump is like the most important thing because they are in their lives. And people are saying, this thing you believe is so dumb, how could you believe that. And then they so they say, but it’s all based around Trump. So if Trump said it’s real, then they’re confirmed. And so initially they were saying oh, he used the number 17 or he waved his hand like a Q. Queue they were so desperate for this. And so he started getting asked about this in the 2020 election. And people would say, well, an interviewer would say, what do you think about qanon? These are the people who think you’re after the pedophile cabal. And isn’t that ridiculous. And he would say, I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it. And, just from QAnon believers I talked to that really improved their faith in QAnon and helped them continue holding on to it for a while. And then you also have Trump associates like Kash Patel, who in the case of Truth Social, Trump’s social network when it was launched, and Kash Patel said I think people are having fun with Q and I think also that I don’t really follow him. We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences, because whoever that person has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement basically says, I want this to be a home for things like QAnon. So the promise of QAnon in this whole period is that there will eventually be the storm. A lot of what you’re seeing happening in the Trump administration, a lot of the flailing around, a lot of the apparent chaos behind it. There is a plan. Trust the plan is one of the big watch terms of QAnon. Then you have the 2020 election. Donald Trump loses. He has his own conspiracy theory about whether he lost, but he loses. There is no storm. January 6 happens. People are arrested for it. They do storm the Capitol, but they do not take over the government. What happens to QAnon after that. So this is the biggest challenge for QAnon. I mean, the entire point of QAnon was the only way we can take on the pedophile cabal is if Donald Trump is elected. That’s why the military recruited them, they believe, and then he loses. And so January 6 was a lot of people had pinned their hopes on that being the storm. And then it didn’t happen. And so then they kept thinking, well, maybe all these troops are in DC for the inauguration to arrest Biden. And that didn’t happen. And I talked to a QAnon believer the day of the inauguration who said, I threw up. I was so upset that suddenly as Biden put his hand on the Bible, it became clear to me that this wasn’t going to happen. And so QAnon kind of stumbles along there Q comes out and basically says, stop talking about q, keep talking about the cabal. Stop talking about Q So much, essentially, because people have realized that we’re lunatics. If you talk about Q or where we go, on we go all our slogans, but keep the ideas going. And so from there, QAnon gets subsumed in a way into the broader Republican Party. We can think about Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a hardcore QAnon believer at the time. I mean, I’ve looked at her posts. I mean, she wasn’t someone who just posted q a couple times. She was like deep in it. And so now she’s one of the most prominent members of the House. She’s a huge fundraiser. So a lot of these people, they take off the QAnon outfit, but they still keep thinking in that way. So you mentioned a few minutes ago that during this period, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein is found dead in his cell. So in not the background, but not the foreground compared to q, there is this other thing happening where there actually is a very rich and powerful person who has been arrested for pedophilia, for sex trafficking, and then he’s found dead mysteriously. Tell me a bit about the theories that begin to build around that and how these things converge. Yeah, I mean, I think the most effective conspiracy theories really have a grain, a kernel of truth at their center where they have something that is genuinely very weird or unprecedented or uncomfortable or a crime in this case. And in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, even from the start of QAnon or its precursor conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, Epstein was really a lot of material was drawn from him because it was a case of someone who was sex trafficking, who had powerful connections. And so they already were very interested in Jeffrey Epstein. And then when he was indicted and then later found dead, that, I mean, that made it just explode because this was a case where people didn’t come off like a crazy person. If you said, don’t you think it’s weird What happened to Jeffrey Epstein. What was he doing. How did he have all these connections to people like Bill Clinton or Donald Trump. And from there, then you can kind of recruit people into believing in something more outlandish QAnon. And so really, I would say Epstein’s death, even before the pandemic, was really a huge crossover moment for QAnon in terms of getting new recruits, because people really were legitimately unsettled by it. So David French, my colleague, had this good line where he called the Jeffrey Epstein theories, the thinking man’s QAnon. And I get that because the thing about Epstein is that it is weird, and there are things in it that are hard to explain. And there are things here that really happened, right. This was not a bunch of cryptic Delphic writings on an internet message board. So maybe let’s start this section this way. If you were trying to explain the Jeffrey Epstein story, not any conspiracies, just the story to somebody who didn’t really know anything about it, how would you do it. Sure I mean, so there let’s say, the early aughts, there’s this guy named Jeffrey Epstein who is fabulously wealthy. People don’t know why he’s so wealthy. Really he is. He is just leagues beyond he’s ostensibly had had some time in finance in Manhattan, but he’s like leagues beyond in terms of wealth. What you would expect that to be. He has an enormous home in Manhattan. He has a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He has a ranch out West. He has a private jet. He’s real. He has an island. I mean, that’s the. It all comes back to the island. I mean, he’s very, very wealthy. And people, people write articles. How is this guy so wealthy. What’s it. Where does he get all these connections. And then in, I believe, 2005, a mother calls the police in Palm Beach and says, my teenage daughter said that this man, Jeffrey Epstein, offered her money to give him a massage, and he masturbated. And there was this essentially a sex crime has happened here. The police take it very seriously. They start investigating. They find many girls who were given this treatment by Epstein, and they start wondering, why is this guy so well connected. Why is he they’re surveilling him at the airport as he takes off on the private jet. And then when they start actually trying to prosecute him, it seems like he has a lot of friends in high places. He has really high powered lawyers. He has people are prosecutors on the case are being kind of shuffled around, moved away. There’s a sense of don’t look at this too closely. And then ultimately, he signs a plea deal that has been called, the deal of the century that in exchange for pleading guilty to a couple of these cases in Palm Beach, he eventually ends up on house arrest. And it’s been said that, what they had on him could have put him away for life. Instead, the federal and local authorities agree that, they’re just not going to prosecute him anymore beyond that. So there’s some other weird dimensions of plea deal. There’s immunity for co-conspirators. And there’s something that comes up later that I think is very of all the things that always piqued my interest in this, the prosecutor, the local DA, or whomever it is Alex Acosta is, he later becomes Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary. But there is a report in the Daily Beast that when he’s being vetted for Labor Secretary, he’s asked by Trump officials, what’s up with this sweetheart deal you gave Epstein. And again, this is in a Daily Beast report. And it’s not coming from Acosta himself. It’s coming from some unnamed Trump official. But apparently Acosta says oh, I was told he belongs to intelligence and to back off. And if you take that at face value, it adds this other dimension here that somehow he is an intelligence asset. Somehow he is protected. And not only that, but the government knows about all this. But also, weirdly, for where this story goes, the Trump administration knows about all this. So what did you make of that. So the Jeffrey Epstein intelligence connection is really interesting because it flares up because you might wonder what it ties into a lot of the mystery about him, because you say, why is this guy so wealthy. Why does he have all these locations. Why does he have all these really high powered connections. Why does he seem to move through the world with ease, inexplicably. And so people start to wonder, that intelligence remark in the Daily Beast report has really been scrutinized. People start to wonder, is this guy running like a honeypot? Does he blackmail powerful people. Do let’s say and this is pure conjecture, do they come to the island and he plies them with underage girls or adult women. And does he videotape them, perhaps, and then use that as blackmail material. And so, I mean, and is that how he then got so wealthy. And so that idea then becomes a key part of the Epstein story. The other thing I would say is the intelligence connection is then used to explain for people who scrutinize this, how he then managed to get off so easily. I mean, was Jeffrey Epstein an intelligence operation that then in Palm Beach ran off the rails, and then they essentially tried to cover it up. Here’s something I’ve been wondering about this story. So the Acosta dimension of it, it’s not like Acosta disappeared from public view. After this, he became Labor Secretary for Donald Trump in the first term, he ended up having to resign as Labor Secretary because the Epstein story kept growing and it was becoming a distraction. But he gives a press conference all this. And obviously, if somebody told him Epstein was an intelligence source, it would probably be helpful to Acosta or helpful to the rest of us if he would say, well, here’s who told me that. But Acosta hasn’t. To my knowledge, he doesn’t really admit this ever having happened. Maybe it never happened, right. Maybe this initial Daily Beast report, which is all unnamed. I mean, maybe that’s the thing that’s untrustworthy, but what do you actually substantively make of it. Like what is your hypothesis of what we should think about that comment like Acosta just got named to the board of directors of Newsmax he exists out there in the world. People can ask him questions. Yeah, that is a great question. You would think that in the way that this imploded his career or has haunted him forever, this plea deal, why doesn’t he come out and say, well, basically, I was told by the head of this Intelligence Agency to leave it alone. And so it’s not really my fault. But as you said, he hasn’t vanished. He’s certainly not talking about it, I think. I mean, there are a lot of weird intelligence connections. I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s friend and Lieutenant, her dad had a ton of intelligence connections and was involved in various intelligence operations. I mean, I think part of the challenge is and part of why this story is so interesting to people is because unless these secret files come out, that may or may not exist, it’s really unknowable. Another dimension of the Epstein story. You mentioned his wealth is a bit mysterious for what he appeared to be doing. He was maybe a money manager to some degree, maybe offering tax and estate planning advice, but he seems richer than that should have been able to offer him. But the other thing is, he also seems better connected than that. Should have been able to offer him again. One thing that I think is somewhat complicated for this whole the way this theory begins to evolve, or the way the ideas around it begin to evolve, is somebody who was very well connected to was Donald Trump and somebody who appeared to have known early on that Epstein liked young women was Donald Trump. Tell me about the Donald Trump Epstein relationship. So, I mean, Donald Trump was friends with Epstein for a long time. I mean, there’s a video of them. They’re kind of on the side of a dance floor, and they’re whispering to each other. They seem to be saying, she’s hot. Maybe I’ll ask her to dance later. And then there’s this quote Trump gave for a profile of Epstein, one of these profiles that’s saying, how is this guy. This guy seems to be a billionaire. No one can explain his wealth. Then Trump says many people say Jeffrey Epstein. And I’m paraphrasing here, but people say Jeffrey Epstein likes young women. Even maybe even more than me. I mean, very young. I’m going to go I’m going to give the whole quote here. He says, this is New York Magazine in 2002. Trump says, I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side, no doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life. It’s a little odd. It is. I mean, it kind of. You think back to how people would talk about Harvey Weinstein before MeToo and it’s this weird open secret that people will nod to. But how does. I guess one question I have as this begins to merge altogether and Trump, the Savior of QAnon, the scourge purge of pedophilic elites, but maybe the only person on record as early as 2002 saying that he knows Jeffrey Epstein has a thing for young women. That doesn’t seem like the. That doesn’t seem like a guy you would put your trust in to be outside of this and your Savior from it. That seems like a guy who might be part of this thing, whatever it is. Well Ezra, you’ve got to think about this QAnon. I mean, this makes Trump the perfect guy to take it all down in their case. You’re right. I mean, it is kind of crazy. Their rationalization is that let’s say we look at this video of Trump hanging out with Epstein. Well, perhaps he was going inside. He was looking inside Epstein’s operation to bring it down from the inside. Or you say, well, why would he pick Alex Acosta, the guy involved in this nice plea deal. Epstein got. Why would he make him the head of the Labor Department, which has a ton of oversight over human trafficking. Well, Trump was maybe trying to bring attention to the plea deal and to get it overturned by elevating Acosta’s profile. That’s how they see it. We know Trump is subtle. If nothing else, he does things through misdirection and symbolism. But I want to stay on what’s strange about Epstein for a couple of minutes. So Epstein is really well connected. He is friendly, not just with Donald Trump. He is friendly with Bill Gates. He’s friendly with Bill Clinton. He hosts these dinners for scientists and innovators. He has lots of friends who are very, very rich. And so the idea that begins to emerge, as I understand it, is that Epstein is running something like what we would now describe as the Diddy parties, but for the most powerful people in society that he on his island, is flying back and forth with the most powerful and most wealthy people in the world for these pedophilic orgies, and that it is in the union of these two things that the cabal like begins to take a shape that Epstein knew everybody. He knew what they had done. Maybe he’s doing it in part for blackmail, for intelligence reasons. Maybe just he has the files on them. And so Epstein is a threat to them and the whole cabal. And when he begins to get brought down, now this whole thing is endangered. And the fact that he ends up dead in a cell, reportedly by suicide, begins to look to people. Very fishy. Is that basically the structure of the theory here. That is the crux of it, the idea that he finally has this federal case in which he could potentially flip or maybe all of this evidence will, at minimum, come out at trial that someone perhaps either he’s killed in his cell or someone, which I think is maybe more believable that someone says, hey, Jeffrey, we’re going to create the circumstances for you to take things into your own hands, that is the Epstein story summed up. So I want to hold on that last bit because again, this is where there are things that are weird. Epstein has already tried to kill himself in prison. It has been the psychologist or the person in charge of mental health or said, this guy should not be allowed in a cell by himself. He’s a suicide risk. He is left in a cell by himself. There’s irregularities around which cameras are on and off, and whether or not they’re working, irregularities around whether or not the guards are watching or not watching. And on the one hand, I think that if you don’t believe DMVs are run well, you should not believe prisons are run well. I think all evidence we have about processes that run, in fact, terribly. And on the other hand, for such a high value prisoner who there’s a lot of interest in, it’s strange. Like, I get why people think it’s strange. I think it is strange. You’re somebody who studies conspiracy theories. Theories that typically I think you don’t believe. Where do you fall on this. Like, what do you think. Yeah I mean, if I can get a little kind of wild and woolly with it, I mean, this is one that I’m quite suspicious of I think as you said, I mean, I’m used to really going through the guts of conspiracy theories and saying, well, I think we can chalk that up to human incompetence or just a coincidence. But in this case, I think there’s a lot of smoke. I mean, again, I don’t think we’ve seen anything that really what you described as the mainline Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory, I don’t think has been substantiated in a lot of ways. But I think also there is a lot of weirdness, and I think we’re at risk of discrediting ourselves with the general public if as the media or the government or whatever, in terms of people who look into this, if you just say, Nope, you he killed himself. Case closed. There’s nothing weird here. I think I want to just like to be fair to the other side of this, try to give my best version of how you would explain most of this away and see what you think of it. So Epstein seems to have been very, very good at ingratiating himself with very rich people, something in between a money manager and a con man, and that he was living beyond his actual means. But at the end of the day, when people captured him and he was put in prison, the Epstein estate was not actually that large. So it’s not like he was sitting on billions of dollars. So maybe you could explain that as con man work, the fact that all these rich people know each other and flying planes together is it’s just what their networks look like. And that, Yes, Epstein was a pedophile. And he working with Maxwell did groom young women and assault them and that he was just kind of doing that himself. And there isn’t that much evidence. I mean smoke around Prince Andrew, but we don’t really know what was going on there. And maybe this looks really weird and there’s not that much there. The weird truth of this is that there’s not all that much important order behind it. That’s the best account I can give in which there’s not much there. What do you think of that. I think that’s very possible. I mean, I think there are. When I look at conspiracy theories, there are often cases where I say Yeah, maybe this guy has weird art you don’t like. Maybe he made a couple of color remarks, but it’s very possible that then you’re making it a jump to that. This guy is running a child sex dungeon or what have you that there’s kind of a logical leap there. And I think it’s very possible that Jeffrey Epstein was a guy with a lot of powerful friends who was, incidentally, a pedophile, and that these powerful people were not involved with that aspect of his life. And maybe he got this sweetheart plea deal because he was just a rich guy in Palm Beach, and they wanted to move on with it and cover it up or ultimately, maybe there was this whole intelligence aspect to it. So I think that question about it could go either way, I think, is why in part there’s so much pressure for the release of whatever the government can release. Tell me about the role that Epstein and the Epstein files begin to play in the broader MAGA movement, because specifically of the connection to Bill Clinton and and by relation, Hillary Clinton. They become really fixated on this idea that Jeffrey Epstein was like the Democrats pedophile pimp and that anyone you personally don’t like as a Trump supporter is probably on the Epstein list, and that someday this will all come out. The Epstein stuff and the broader feeling of like something is being kept from you is really the most visible and maybe the most potent aspect of the broader kind of Trumpian populism, this idea that there’s this group of elites that are doing bad things to you, and they’re getting away with it. So they’re shipping your jobs overseas. They’re bringing in immigrants to depress your wages. Who knows what they’re doing with gender to your children. And then at the very top, let’s say in the case of JFK, they killed the president. They in the case of Epstein, they did all these terrible things to children. And they’re doing it with impunity. And they think you’re too dumb to even know about it or that you don’t deserve to know about it. And so there’s that idea that your intelligence is being insulted, that I think really plays on these Trumpian chords and gets people riled up. This is not random people saying this. JD JD Vance in October 2024, so very close to the election says we need to release the Epstein files. This is important. Yeah, I mean, Epstein kind of catches on with the broader public and becomes a topic like a cocktail party conversation topic. So when people like JD Vance go on these kind of bro comedy podcasts, people, I think, understandably say, hey what’s up with Epstein. If you were elected, would you want to get to the bottom of that. And in JD Vance’s case, he says Yeah, we got to get this list out there. Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing. But do you think he believes there is a list. It’s hard to know. I mean, JD Vance is kind of a populist, at least posing guy. I mean, I don’t think really that there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who are saying there was nothing going on with Epstein. This is all just for the rubes. I think they did definitely see it as an opportunity to inflame people against Democrats and to give bigger stakes than just we’re going to do tariffs, we’re going to do tax cuts. If you say like we’re going to get justice for against the international pedophile network, I think that reaches people on a different level. But it ends up being a series of somewhat disappointing busts. Yes in the case of the Epstein binders debacle, I mean, I think that really sums up so much of how the administration has handled this. Can you describe what happened there. Absolutely This was a couple of weeks, months ago now. This was late February. And so you have a bunch of these kind of right wing media influencers, a couple rungs below someone who might be on Fox News, people who have been maybe conspiracy theorists in the past and now have big YouTube, X followings. So they visit the White House to meet with administration officials and kind of get celebrated. The new administration and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel show up, seemingly like, to everyone else’s surprise, in the White House. And they say, look, we’ve got these binders and it says phase one of the Epstein files. We’ve all been so excited about the Epstein files. And so they give them to these influencers. Those folks then go outside the White House press pool is there, and they get these photos where they’re really gripping and grinning with the evidence of the human trafficking conspiracy theory. And then it all turns out to be nearly entirely all public information already. So reportedly, Pam Bondi was hoping to butter up these influencers and get some good press for herself, but in the end, it becomes really a fiasco, both for her and for these figures. So what begins to happen after that. Because Yeah, just tell me the story from there. Sure so then there is more and more demand, basically, particularly from these people who receive the binders because they’re saying kind of made me look like a fool. So we really need to release the actual Epstein information. Phase two. And so there’s more pressure. James O’Keefe, the kind of undercover guy catches Pam Bondi on tape saying oh my gosh, there are tens of thousands of Epstein videos that no one knows exists. And so there’s this drumbeat more and more demand for Epstein info. When and so much when is the client list going to come out. When are we going to get the names of these pedophiles? And not just that, but Pam Bondi at some point says she has the client list on her desk, or at least it’s something that sounds it’s I want to be careful here, because the White House’s argument is that we misinterpreted what she said. Yes, there’s this interesting ambiguity, but she says, or excuse me, she’s on Fox News. And the anchor says the DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. Will that really happen. It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that. I’m reviewing JFK files, MLK files. That’s all in the process of being reviewed. And so that is interpreted as she’s the it there is the Epstein client list. And now they’re claiming, oh, that’s not what she meant. The White House Twitter account, they reposted that video, people were saying, oh my gosh, she has the client list. So they said effectively Yeah, this is true. And now you start seeing this other weird thing happening. So of everybody in the administration, I think Kash Patel is probably at the cabinet level, the most bought into and the most connected to MAGA conspiracy land. And then he goes on Joe Rogan and gives a crazy interview. But what about the video of from the island. Oh, that’s. Sorry so you’re talking about two different things. Yes so sorry. So Yeah. So again, we’re going to give you everything we can. And people have to remember we’re not going to revictimize women. We’re not going to put that shit back out there. It’s not happening. Because then he wins. Not doing it. You want to hate me for it. Fine again, logical play out. If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I’m in charge. Don’t you think you’d see it. Yeah there starts to be this new angle where Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, who’s another real right wing media guy. They then start kind of trying to throw water on Epstein after the binders incident, where they start saying, they do interviews and they say, look, Epstein killed himself. And as you said, there are a lot of videos. But, I mean, it becomes almost this weird twist where they start saying we’re not going to release these sicko videos. Why are you even asking about that effectively. And it’s like, well, you were the one who was really hyping up this information. And so they start really trying to I would say, lower expectations about what’s going to happen. How well does that work. Not very well. I mean, people became furious with Kash Patel and Bongino. I mean, they were really already facing criticism for a lot of other things. This is an audience that wants. They want Democrats heads to roll. They think the deep state was out to get Trump for many other reasons. And they’re not seeing Hillary Clinton getting arrested or the people who prosecuted Trump getting arrested. And so they’re already really mad. And you can see that the pressure in particular is getting to Bongino because he’s posting all the time. He’s saying, this is the deputy FBI director. Like he should have better things to do. But he’s posting, I’m working really hard on finding out who took cocaine to the White House or who planted the pipe bomb at January 6 because they believe that was like a false flag operation. So this is an administration that you can see is already really beholden to these, to satisfying these conspiracy theories. This gets at something that is different about Trump’s second administration from his first in Trump one, his administration was staffed with a lot of members of the Republican or business establishment. And so there was this layer of separation between Trump and the MAGA types inside the White House and his administration. When he complained that there was a deep state that was fighting him. It may not have been true in the sense he sometimes meant it, but there was a bureaucracy. There were other factions and coalitions that were not bought into what MAGA was in his second term. That separation isn’t there anymore. He has put the most loyal soldiers he can find in these positions. I mean, nobody can say Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are members of the establishment. They were not promoted up through the ranks of the FBI. Pam Bondi is very much hand-picked by Donald Trump. Like elsewhere, you have people like RFK jr. And so there is this absence that emerges of the ability to use the move. Trump used all the time in his first administration, which is can’t blame me. I’m at war with these people. Now they’re his people. And Trump himself seems to be getting upset that they’re not being trusted. That MAGA is turning on them and not trusting him. And he gives this comment when asked about it by the press. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein. This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking. We have Texas, we have this. We have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep. That is unbelievable. What have you made of where Trump is on this and his sudden, sense that it’s ridiculous to keep asking about this creep. Jeff Epstein. I mean, I think Trump is basically just expecting this movement that he has created, this MAGA movement with a whole lot of conspiracy theorists in it, no matter how much I mean, this is a guy who would signal to QAnon and he would say, well, maybe QAnon is right about some things. And now he’s expecting them to fall into line. And on one hand, I can see why he would think that. Because they’ve fallen in line on so many other things in the past. But now. But this potentially, I think this Epstein thing is so powerful to people. And it’s something that you really have to swallow. I mean, you’re going to accept I mean, if they believe that there’s a pedophile cabal, you’re going to accept that there’s Trump’s not going to pursue them. I’m not going to get justice. That’s a lot to take. Or you have to accept that they were all lying to you Yes And that is the worst case scenario. They’re going to let the pedophile cabal keep going. Best case scenario, they were capitalizing on genuine cases of young girls being sexually abused that they ginned that up and used it to help win the election. There’s another figure in here who seems significant to me, which is Elon Musk. Tell me a bit about Elon Musk’s role in all this. Yeah, I mean, I think Musk has really helped bring this Epstein situation to a boil just in the past couple months. So Elon Musk obviously was a very close Trump Lieutenant and funder and very involved with DOGE. But then after he and Trump had a falling out a few weeks ago, he comes out and says and there’s this he’s kind of biting Trump. There’s this, oh, they’re spending too much money. Ultimately, that’s not really something MAGA people care too much about. Oh, he’s not being enough of a deficit hawk. But then amid this kind of day long fight, he then comes out. Musk comes out and says, well what. You’re not going to get the Epstein files because Trump is in the Epstein files, and that’s why they’re not coming out. Yeah this is June 5. He tweets. Time to drop the really big bomb. At real, Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. And that is a big bomb. And I think that was treated greatly by people in the MAGA movement and these right wing influencers and everyone else, as suddenly the moment that the gloves were off. And this is a rift that cannot be healed. Musk has since deleted that tweet, although on July 7 he wrote what’s a time. Oh look, it’s no one has been arrested. O’clock again. I guess there are two ways of understanding Musk here. One is that he knows something, that he was inside the government, that his DOGE people were everywhere, and that he is telling us this thing that he knows that many people also believed might be true, because Trump did have this relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And the other is that he knows nothing, but he does understand the pressure points of the MAGA base. And he does understand that Epstein is a high engagement topic, and he even knows that it can’t really be disproven because how do you rebut the idea that there’s a secret file connecting Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. Where are you on this. Yeah I mean, I think if you looked if this was any other administration and the president’s closest advisor and bankroll comes out and says this president is in the pedophile files. It would be treated very seriously. I think that Musk is obviously a very smart guy. And on one hand, perhaps he is recognizing that this is the ultimate insult to pull on Trump and something that will cause Trump a lot of trouble with the base as it has gone on to cause or he did have people all over the government. I mean, who’s to say. And, himself, is very insinuated or was in Trump circles. So many things about Epstein, who’s to say it’s not true. The other dimension of Musk is that I mean, he owns Twitter or I guess we should call it x And his I mean, his posts on that get I mean, he’s juiced his own centrality to the algorithm. So when he writes something gets tens of millions, sometimes even more than that. Views so when he broadcasts this and he’s been recently retweeting people talking about it. He’s able to go onto one of these central platforms that has been a ground 0 for this kind of conspiracy thinking, and make the conspiracy more engaging. Tell the algorithm that things that talk about Jeffrey Epstein are things you really want to be showing to people. And so I feel like there’s an interesting dimension of to that. One one of the reasons I think so many MAGA people have gotten into this. It’s not that nobody else was interested in Jeffrey Epstein, but until you know something. This is how I always felt about it. It’s like, I do think there’s smoke there. I do think it looks weird. And on the other hand, it’s hard to say anything because I don’t know anything. But if you’re in the engagement business and you don’t care about facts, then it’s easy to say things and in fact, profitable because people want to hear it. They want to hear the speculation here. There is interest. You will get views. You will get retweets. You will get people listening to your podcast. And Musk has just turned x into a kind of clearinghouse and turned up the dial on this particular controversy. And then all these people in the administration, they’re really addicted to x, they’re there and they’re in the particular subcultures of it that talk about this. And so it’s not just me Musk has been able to make. It has been able to Levy the accusation in a way that’s a little bit hard to rebut, even though, nor has he ever offered any evidence. It’s also that he has kind of filled their attentional world with it, which I think if you’re not in their attentional world, you probably don’t realize how big this is now. On right wing MAGA x. Yeah, I think that’s a great way to put it. I mean, he controls, one of the main discussion platforms or media distribution outlets in MAGA Twitter or X is obviously not actually huge in terms of its user base. We know that it really doesn’t drive traffic to news articles, but for conservatives it is hugely popular. Now, Elon has shown that he will pull all kinds of different games in terms of what gets incentivized on the platform, and he’s literally paying people to drive more engagement. So in that way, I think it encourages people to really whip up these mobs. And what is more controversial or going to get people talking more than Epstein. And on the other hand, I would say for Trump supporters or allies who want to say, hey, guys, I mean, the party line now is get over it, move on. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really go well on X. And people are going to say, hey, pipe down or you’re being a hypocrite. And obviously I think Musk is happy to oversee that. One thing that I found interesting about the MAGA freak out here, you have some pretty loud voices angry about this. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on X, no one believes her is not a client list. Tucker Carlson said, I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now. Alex Jones released a video where he says by coming in and becoming part of the cover up, the Trump administration has become part of it. You cannot see it any other way. I could keep quoting these, but then when I go and watch them or look at them, they’re very careful to stay away from Trump himself. They blame Pam Bondi. Some people say there’s a conspiracy that is even more powerful than Donald Trump that he is not, in fact, at the top. The elite pedo ring is above him. But there is this. Even as Trump of people in the administration had the most direct connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Like you listen to Alex Jones and he’s trying to praise the Trump administration and say, but this makes me want to throw up. There’s something weird here in the. They’re looking they need somebody to take the fall for this. But the fact that ultimately the buck has to stop with Trump here on some level, you don’t really see that many of them saying that. That’s right. I mean, so much of the power, particularly for these kind of right wing influencer characters. Their power derives from closest to Trump and certainly to Trump. Not ripping into you in a Truth Social post, which I think is what they’re afraid of. And so they have to. Who else can they blame. Well, Pam Bondi I think has been the main one, but even they must know that she wouldn’t do this all on her own. So this kind of twisted logic they have to do, it’s the fault of the media for not asking Trump enough Epstein questions so that he knows this is a big deal to us. Sorry that’s very funny. Well, and then you saw when someone did ask and he goes, I don’t want to talk about it, let’s move on. And so they expect that suddenly the media, their arch enemies should be working hand in hand with them to really get justice. I think it is interesting the way this has taken root and has begun to be at least seen as a genuine problem for the Trump administration, and I think it gets at the way. You cannot attack a coalition using the rules of the other coalition. People think the deficit is a real problem and want sane and sober policy to do something about it. They’re already not really on board with Donald Trump. People who are really going to vote based on what happens with Medicaid. Most of them already don’t like Donald Trump, or if they’re paying enough attention, they don’t like Donald Trump, that liberals endlessly want to attack Donald Trump in their own framework of the world. He’s a threat to democracy. He says things that are untrue all the time. He’s outrageous, he’s cruel. He’s destroying due process and deporting all these people without any kind of evidentiary standard. It’s like when you’re dealing with a coalition that is conspiratorial, that is anti-system, that is founded on its idea that the ruling class is corrupt and is lying to you, and nothing they say can be trusted. That in some ways, the thing that is very hard for that coalition to deal with is an attack under its own terms. Suddenly its leaders have become the ruling class, and they seem to now be part of the corruption, and they seem to now be part of the cover up. And now they can’t be trusted. And there’s a bit of the dog that caught the car in all of this. Yeah, I mean, they are stuck in the world they created or under the terms of governance that they created. I mean, they said, we’re going to get these files. There is an Epstein client list or perhaps she said it’s on my desk, a Pam Bondi. And this is and they’ve also, I will say, taught their audience to really reflexively distrust people in power, whether it’s don’t trust what Doctor Fauci says about COVID or don’t trust the government when it comes to your kids’ education. And so now they’re saying, I mean, really, Trump is saying, look, I’m the president. Get over it. Move on. I say, it’s fine. And that is something these people are not really used to believing. Do you think they will get over it and move on in two weeks and it’s fine. I think it’s going to stick around longer than that. I mean, I think Trump has sent enough messages and you know where it’s reported that he was, making personal calls to some of these right wing thought leaders to say, hey, cut it out. Or to someone like Charlie Kirk, why did you appear with Steve Bannon and really kind of lambast my administration. And suddenly Charlie Kirk says, I’m not talking about it anymore. So in that way, incredible journalistic ethics over there. Yes so a real profile in courage. So, so now you have this situation where I think a lot of these the really vocal people, the people who are getting invites to the White House are probably going to chill out on it or potentially risk their careers. On the other hand, I think this is going to be harder to square for number one people, kind of in the Joe Rogan world who brought a lot of people to Trump and who have their own kind of credibility outside of Trump. And then for the average, Trump voter, I think they’re just kind of upset about it. And this is a hard thing to say because of my devotion to Donald Trump, I’m going to bury my concerns about the pedophile cabal. There’s also a dimension here where the Democrats clearly smell blood. So Jon Ossoff had this viral clip. The Senator from Georgia. Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files. But you see beyond him, Democrats in Congress like calling for the release of the Epstein files. And I think Democrats now see this as a free way to crack up the MAGA coalition, because whatever the Epstein files are, either they are not satisfying or the Trump administration feels they can’t release them. If the Trump administration had a thing it could release by now, they would have. So now they’re in a bind. And Yes, maybe the MAGA right tries to back off on this, but you can always tell when the opposition smells blood. And clearly on this the Democrats smell blood. Like I would not be surprised to begin seeing ads on this. I would not be surprised to see this in midterm campaigns that as a thing that can be frustrating for the other side. They seem to have fastened on this as a line of attack that works under the terms of the Trump administration, as opposed to only under the terms of the Democratic coalition. Yeah I mean, I think it’s a great wedge issue, potentially. I mean, you can see that it’s an issue that kind of depresses Trump supporters that they’re left defending something they don’t really like. In the way the Democrats have been forced to defend institutions that are imperfect. And now Trump supporters, I think, will find themselves facing look, we just have to move on because the president said so. I mean, I don’t think that’s really a winning issue. There’s also this way in which it gets at something bigger to me. So I’d mentioned a minute ago this piece by my colleague David French, where he says that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy was the thinking man’s QAnon, and he had this other good line in there, he said. MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance. And MAGA supporters are so convinced of the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump, who dares to tell them the truth, or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves. And I think that first part of it is really true. The macro world really does rely on fooling its own people constantly, and it’s a thing that has always struck me about Trump and the people around him, that they treat their followers with a lot of disrespect. They’re constantly just kind of pulling the wool over their eyes, telling them, telling them there are no Medicaid cuts in a bill that is full of Medicaid cuts to me, that’s a very consequential way to lie to people who are depending on saying he’s going to end all these wars that he can’t actually and in fact, does not have an intention of ending. And you just see this, I don’t know. I think scandals are always about something else. And the idea that Mag has been selling its own people kind of a bill of goods, and it has no intention to deliver. Maybe it can’t even deliver like that. Feels very that feels very real. And it’s to the extent Epstein makes it legible, it’s interesting, but it exists across the entire operation of this administration and of this movement. I in a way, I think, because there is this what you might call a reality distortion field that I think a lot of MAGA voters exist in, where suddenly, Donald Trump will turn on someone or he’ll turn on a policy idea and you’re supposed to hate what you loved yesterday. I think Epstein is unique because it is so emotionally powerful to people and because they have trained. I mean, it’s not like some industrial policy or something that they can say, Oh, well, who cares. It is something that I think a lot of people have put it kind of a core of their beings and this idea that we’re going to get justice for this. And that’s what being a Trump supporter is about. And then suddenly Trump says in a very disrespectful way, get over it. I mean, he was mad. And then saying that Obama made the files, things that really don’t hold up to any amount of scrutiny. I think this idea that people are having their intelligence disrespected is very powerful. And I think it’s something that once they say, well, what did Trump lie to me about or fail to deliver there. Well what else am I discontent about that he did. And then always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience. Sure so first, Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F Buckley. It’s big, but it’s worth it. So far from as far as I’ve gotten. I think it’s always interesting to look at these books about politics and ways that even just a few decades ago, how different American politics was. I think we would also think of Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” stuff like that. My second book would be James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid,” a novel about the Kennedy assassination. If you’ve enjoyed thinking, putting yourself in conspiratorial mindset. And obviously, JFK is in the news with the release of these files. I mean, this book really cannot be beat. One of my favorites. And it gets at of like the dark heart of America, which is sometimes a place that’s fun to visit. And then finally, I would say Lucy Sante’s book “Low Life,” about the history of organized crime and kind of skeezy characters in New York over the centuries, is always a good one to visit. And again, kind takes you back. Will Sommer, Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.