“Look, you’ve just got to let go of this Epstein nonsense – not only is there no so called ‘Epstein List’, but Epstein wasn’t murdered, nor did he commit suicide. Because there is no Jeffrey Epstein. There never was!” declared diehard Trump loyalist Senator Deke Probstoon during a fraught interview on CNN. “The FBI and Justice Department have fully investigated the matter and concluded that he was just some kind of media construct created by the liberal media in an attempt to discredit Trump by linking him and various other conservative figures to a non-existent sex scandal! All this talk of client lists is just an attempt to distract attention from the President’s huge achievements in his second term!” The Senator’s outburst came as the president’s claims not to have been a close friend of the deceased billionaire alleged sex offender were called into question by the Florida Weekly Grocery Review’s publication of a photograph apparently showing Donald Trump – clad only in a pair of soiled underpants – jumping out of a giant cake at a birthday party for Epstein. “It’s obviously fake, created with AI, no doubt,” Probstoon claims. “Because it couldn’t have happened as there was no birthday party because there was no Epstein! It’s the same with that list – Trump’s name couldn’t be on it, even if it existed, because there was no Epstein and ‘Epstein Island’ either, chock full of underage girls for those liberal bastards to rape (and worse). You imagined it all as a result of the fake story concocted by the liberal media and its leftist masters!”
Trump himself has seemed confused by the allegations linking him to Epstein, repeatedly claiming that he had never met any such person and dismissing the new photograph, claiming that the man in it looks nothing like him. “It’s obviously false, as I’ve never jumped out of a cake and only wear boxer shorts, not Y-fronts like in that picture,” he angrily told reporters at the White House. “That guy’s too fat and definitely not well-hung enough to be me. It’s fake news!” For many political commentators, these denials come as no surprise. “It’s the only logical conclusion of Trump and his administration’s current attempts to wriggle free from a conspiracy theory which they themselves had nurtured when it suited their purposes,” opines Hobart Hine, Associate Professor of Politics at the San Jose Institute of Midwifery. “That’s the trouble with these things, they have a nasty habit of taking on a life of their own and attracting armies of crazies who won’t be happy until they get more and more ‘evidence’ to support their demented views. Once you start trying to shut it down because it has outlasted its usefulness or, worse, looks as if it can be turned against you, then you, in the eyes of the crazies, become part of the conspiracy to suppress the ‘truth’.”
Indeed, as Hine points out, this latest attempt to shut down whole Epstein controversy simply isn’t being bought by some of Trump’s most extreme supporters, who have spent years calling for the ‘Epstein List’ to be released, having been encouraged to believe that it would implicate all manner of liberal figures while exonerating the president. “They might have swallowed the administration’s claims that Trump being an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon were just misinformation, the result of another leftist conspiracy, but accepting that Epstein never existed is just a bridge too far,” says the academic. “Even trying to rewrite history to claim that it was an attempt by the left to smear the right through this ‘client list’ won’t wash. Trump and his cronies spent far too long fantasising about which liberal figures were on that list for people to forget.”
But what conclusions can we draw from Trump’s attempts to disown the whole Epstein business? “The most obvious is that, contrary to the claims of the Justice Department, there really is an ‘Epstein List’ and his name and/or those of people close to him, are on it,” muses Randy Sluice, political editor of the Portland Adult Cinema Reporter “Which means that he was taking a huge risk in trying to ride the whole business for political advantage for so long – he surely must have known that, eventually, his own supporters would demand its production, which would discredit him, rather than his opponents. Of course, he might simply have thought that his supporters were so dumb that they’d go along with anything he said. After all, he does seem to be regarded as some kind of Messiah by many of them, his word sacrosanct.” Others, though, contend that there really never was an ‘Epstein List’. “There’s always the possibility that there never was a list of Epstein clients – I mean, outside of paperback thrillers and movies, do people actually compose such lists, then hide them away for future blackmail purposes, (only to have half the world’s secret agents searching for it in plots involving double and triple crosses galore, if I’m to believe Robert Ludlum novels)?” asks Herbie Jurkey, politics correspondent for the Kansas City Poultry Examiner. “Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what is meant by the ‘Epstein List’ – perhaps we’re supposed to believe that it is a list composed by investigators going through his records and other evidence? In which case, why wasn’t it acted upon?”
Both journalists agree that, whatever the truth, Trump finds himself boxed in, unable to reveal the list if it does exist for fear of incriminating himself, or because it doesn’t exist. “Inevitably, he does what he always does in such situations – he goes into hard denial mode,” says Hine. “Facts are denied, new narratives fabricated and wild accusations flung around. The ultimate conclusion being the denial of Epstein’s very existence. Face it, Trump is pretty shameless when he comes to this sort of thing – Ukraine started the war Russia, it was Biden who appointed the current chair of the Federal Reserve and Biden who signed that trade deal with Canada and Mexico, to spotlight just a few of his recent attempts to rewrite history. If anyone questions his version of the narrative, producing actual facts, then it is denounced as ‘Fake News’.” Hine, like many other observers, is mildly amazed at how many times these tactics have worked for the Trump administration. “You’d think by now that people, even his own supporters, would be wise to this – yet they continue to lap up his lies because they reinforce their own warped and deluded world views,” he ponders. “Of course, we can’t completely dismiss the possibility that Trump is now so senile that really doesn’t remember that Epstein existed and his supporters have simply been forced to follow suit.”
