Watching Donald Trump try and fail to move the news cycle past Jeffrey Epstein this week was like watching an octopus spray ink and get eaten anyway: a wonder of evolution failing with the strategy that always worked for him.
“The Washington ’Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Trump posted on Sunday on Truth Social, adding that the Cleveland Guardians should go back to being the Indians, too. It was a fairly transparent attempt. Even the ultra-circumspect New York Times, among other outlets, described it as an effort to distract people from his administration’s refusal to release files related to the investigation of Epstein by federal law enforcement.
Then, on Tuesday, House Republican leaders announced that they were cancelling scheduled floor votes and sending lawmakers home for summer recess early, reportedly to head off bipartisan demands to release Epstein material. In death, Epstein may be the only figure Trump cannot upstage, the one story more interesting than him.
There’s a reason the Epstein narrative — both what law enforcement and journalists have documented and the internet conspiracy theories it spawned — has become an immovable object in Americans’ attention, even as Trump tries to force it aside. The disgraced financier was a rich and connected villain who flouted law and decency and, for decades, largely got away with it, confirming Americans’ deepest anxieties about how power works.
The conspiracy theory is that Epstein provided politicians and celebrities with underage girls for sex, and his clients had him killed in prison to keep him quiet. Epstein getting murdered is a more intriguing story than reports he hung himself in his cell, but otherwise the strictly factual version is lurid enough. He allegedly trafficked dozens of victims, many of whom were teenagers, and some of whom have said that powerful figures participated in their abuse. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump — who has sued the paper over its report that he wrote Epstein a lewd birthday note alluding to “secrets” — appears in files related to the investigation, something Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told him in May, a few weeks before he stopped demanding the files’ release. Trump has denied the existence of the letter, and POLITICO has not independently verified it. He has also not been accused of any wrongdoing linked to Epstein.
These events, which already sound like they should be connected by red string on a bulletin board, have been convincingly documented and widely accepted as true. If the conspiracy version of the story is more popular, that’s because it puts the boring and sometimes convoluted details into terms everyone can understand, the same way QAnon and flat Earth theory fictionalize the basic truth that other people know things you don’t and are not particularly concerned with your wellbeing. This sentiment contributed to Trump’s unlikely ascent to the presidency, and ironically, it might prove to be his undoing.
As a vehicle for our worst fears about the 21st-century United States, Epstein is our Dracula. You are probably familiar with Count Dracula, the blood-drinking aristocrat with a taste for virgins who is vulnerable only to holy water and garlic. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in the United Kingdom in 1897, but the vampire legends on which it was based emerged centuries earlier in Eastern Europe. It doesn’t take a degree in folklore and mythology to notice that the count, who leaves his castle only to drain the life from peasants and corrupt young women, and who persists unnaturally from generation to generation until he is stopped by the power of the church, says something about how medieval Europeans saw their titled aristocracy. Dracula is what literary theorists call a big-time metaphor. His parasitic relationship with working people, his rivalry with priests, and his infamous horniness all reflect the anxieties of the late 19th century, when hereditary landowners vied with industrial capital and religious authority for control of Europe, and ordinary people exercised little power in proportion to their number.
The conspiracy version of the Epstein story expresses similar anxieties about power and who wields it in the 21st-century United States. This conspiracy narrative diverges from the factual version in two ways: (1) Epstein didn’t kill himself while awaiting trial; he was murdered, and (2) he kept a “client list” of wealthy and powerful people to whom he had provided underage girls for sex, which he used to blackmail public figures.
It is known that Epstein’s social circle included Trump, Bill Clinton and Les Wexner, the billionaire and former CEO of Victoria’s Secret. The reporter Julie Brown has identified more than 60 victims of a sex trafficking ring Epstein allegedly ran, some of whom named other public figures in their accounts. Epstein often traveled by private plane, and while celebrities from Clinton to attorney Alan Dershowitz have acknowledged that they flew on this plane, none has admitted to illicit sex.
The various Epstein conspiracy theories fill in the gaps between these facts with plausible but unsupported speculation: that Epstein used his private plane to fly public figures to his island, where they engaged in the kind of illegal sex acts he and his clients were rich enough to get away with. The theory holds that along with his Renfield, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein secretly videotaped these sexual encounters to use as leverage over his clients, giving them a shared interest in keeping him quiet that again trumped law and decency when they had him killed before his trial.
This narrative, like the Dracula story, says some obvious things about how our culture understands its ruling class. The most powerful figure in it is not an elected politician or celebrity but rather a financial adviser, a guy whose money and connections make him the real force behind the facade of representative government and impartial law. Although he did business in the United States, his company was headquartered in the Virgin Islands for tax purposes, allowing him to avoid the obligations the rest of us owe our country and communities.
The Epstein conspiracy theory describes two Americas, with two sets of laws and standards: the one most of us live in, where you have to go to work, abide by public morals and wait on hold when you call your congressional representative, and the one rich people live in, where statutory rape is an open secret and presidential candidates put aside their differences to hang out on tropical sex islands. In this world, the law, public opinion and party politics have power over ordinary people, but money has the power to transcend all of them. Financiers run the whole thing, literally and figuratively seducing political and cultural leaders in order to control them, while the various rules we democratically agreed on don’t apply to anyone involved — as proven by their successful murder of the only guy with the secrets to bring them down.
It’s a compelling story, and it engages several valid concerns about the United States as it currently operates, but it has some holes. For one thing, why did the conspiracy of wealthy sex perverts wait until Epstein was in prison to kill him, when it presumably would have been easier to do it after he was convicted and released the first time, or after the second time a grand jury was convened against him but before he was in federal custody? If you believe a group of powerful people killed Epstein to keep him from revealing what he knew, you have to ask why he didn’t die in a car accident, instead of during the three minutes that were cut from the camera recording near his cell, as many theorists believe. (That the three minutes were cut is reported, not rumored; what, if anything, the three minutes showed is not known.)
The Epstein conspiracy theories are unproven, but you don’t have to say the words “hyoid bone” to read the Epstein story as a fable of how power works in the 21st-century United States. The non-conspiracy version of events says just as much.
In this version, New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Facility, the jail where Epstein died that a court ordered closed in 2021, simply didn’t work very well. The plumbing was leaking, and the building was falling apart. The camera system didn’t work right. The guards were overworked and understaffed and sat in the break room browsing the internet when they were supposed to be making their rounds.
This story of institutional failure should be familiar to anyone who has been to a VA hospital or worked somewhere that got bought by a private equity fund. It’s the story of a system that prioritizes low taxes and high profits over how well anything actually works, cutting costs and squeezing wages at the expense of long-term success. In other words, it’s the story of a country that runs according to the interests of Epstein’s clients: wealthy people who get their money from rents, investments and inheritances and therefore have a material interest in nothing changing, not this month, unless it’s a lower tax rate. It’s the story of finance taking over the economy and money taking over politics, the story of a system that doesn’t do enough to restrain the power of those few Americans who live well without working, even as the rest of us are supposed to rule by majority. In other words, it is the story of vampires, whose existence is defined by exemption from the rules that determine the shape of ordinary people’s lives.
That is a story of the world we actually live in, and millions of Americans believe it. The conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong — which it almost certainly does — the important parts are still true.
The conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong — which it almost certainly does — the important parts are still true.
As of this writing, Democrats have joined with mutinous congressional Republicans to publicly demand that Trump release information related to the Epstein investigation. It is easy to identify a political motive among the Democrats, but Trump’s failure to corral elected Republicans is unprecedented since 2016. If the money power Epstein represents transcended partisan divisions, so too has our fascination with his story. Should Trump prove unable to quash the public’s interest, and it turns out he loses control of his own party over this issue, of all things, the Epstein legend will have a strong claim to be the defining story of our time.
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