For more than a decade, Donald Trump has failed — despite considerable efforts — to discredit himself in the eyes of his followers. But the Jeffrey Epstein saga might prove different.
Ten days ago, the Department of Justice announced it wouldn’t disclose any more details about deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, reiterated that he had killed himself in prison, that he wasn’t murdered, and that he had no client list. It also said no-one else was to be charged.
This has enraged large swaths of the US president’s usually fawning base, with Trump rounding on his GOP critics and dismissing the Epstein files as “a hoax” perpetrated by the Democrats. His mood will not have been improved by The Wall Street Journal today publishing a chummy letter he allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003, which concludes, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Much has been made of Trump now reaping what he has sown in the fields of conspiracy theories, on Esptein and his approach to politics in general. Indeed, the QAnon movement, which invested Trump with a messianic power, latched onto Epstein, who was as close to a confirmation of their theories around a super-rich network of paedophilic elites as they were likely to get.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1214186
It was Trump himself, within hours of Epstein’s death in 2019, who retweeted a post expressing doubt that Epstein had killed himself, including the line “#JefferyEpstein had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead”. After his return to office, his attorney-general held an event where right-wing online influencers and conspiracy theorists were handed binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”, which they brandished triumphantly on the White House lawn.
But of course, in this as in so much else, Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories simply pulls on a thread deep within America’s conception of politics — one that keeps unspooling, revealing a variety of shades like a magician’s handkerchief.
JFK
The assassination of John F. Kennedy may be the apotheosis of America’s mainstream conspiratorial thinking in the pre-Trump era. There is such a proliferation of theories about what really occurred in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, that we have to limit ourselves to those ventilated in an Oscar-nominated 1991 film.
There is an incredible film to be made about Kennedy. The 35th president’s prodigious infidelity included not only Marilyn Monroe but also Judith Campbell Exner, who was also involved with Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Exner later claimed to have facilitated 10 meetings between the pair to enlist the mob’s help with getting Kennedy elected, and alleged Kennedy tried to enlist the mob to attempt to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Kennedy also kept secret his devastating array of illnesses — and the cocktail of drugs they necessitated — from the American public.
Instead we got Oliver Stone’s fever dream JFK, based on the book by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who claimed to have gotten to the bottom of Kennedy’s murder. In the film’s telling, Kennedy was killed by military-industrial complex figures, with the implicit approval of his VP Lyndon Johnson, because of Kennedy’s apparent desire to pull America out of the Vietnam War. That was the same Vietnam War that Kennedy consistently extended America’s involvement in, sending more troops, advisers and aid to the south.
In 2016, Trump linked the father of his then opponent Ted Cruz to the assassination.
Referencing a recently published — and it turned out, completely made up — National Enquirer story, Trump told a 2016 interview that Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?”
On November 1, 2021, hundreds of QAnon adherents gathered in Dallas in the belief that Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr, would appear at Dealey Plaza the next day and announce that Trump, following his narrow defeat in 2020, would be reinstated as president with Kennedy Jr as his vice president. JFK Jr has been dead since 1999.
Vince Foster
Vince Foster was a counsel in the first Bill Clinton administration who committed suicide in 1993. He is the highest-profile name on the “Clinton Body Count” list — a right-wing email forward (remember those?) that has been circulating for decades — of more than 50 associates and opponents of Bill and Hillary Clinton who have “mysteriously” died.
Trump has repeatedly referenced and amplified the Clinton Body Count theory.
Birchers
It’s a recurring irony: a very wealthy and powerful collective of people form a secretive group and use it to spread the idea that there’s a conspiracy somewhere out there.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1214507
So it was with The John Birch Society — the brainchild of confectionary magnate Robert Welch Jr — a far-right society that believed a vast communist conspiracy had infiltrated US politics, where it was responsible for such ills as fluoride-induced mind control.
At its 1960s peak, the group was an influential part of the Republican Party and (though membership was kept secret) may have had as many as 100,000 dues-paying members in the US.
Many commenters have noted the parallels between Trump and this now largely defunct movement.
Birtherism
Though it has become central to the understanding of Trump’s politics, the campaign that claimed America’s first Black president was secretly a Muslim who had been born in Kenya — and was thus ineligible to serve as president — did not originate with Trump.
Per The Atlantic:
The matter surfaced in the 2008 Democratic primary, through the preferred medium of conspiracy theorists of the late George W. Bush era — the chain email — circulated by frustrated Hillary Clinton supporters. One such email described by Politico in 2011 read, ‘Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.’
Clinton, for her part, said there was nothing to the claim Obama was a Muslim “as far as I know“. Obama had already released his birth certificate in response to the theory by the time Trump embraced it.
9/11
We don’t have the time or space to address the many, many conspiracies that attend the attacks on and destruction of the World Trade Centre buildings in New York on September 11, 2001. But chief among them is the notion that it was “an inside job” conducted to justify the invasion of Iraq and the trampling of civil liberties under the George W. Bush administration.
Among those promoting the “insider job” narrative is far-right activist and “internet personality” Laura Loomer. On September 11 last year, she attended a fire station in lower Manhattan, in the company of then candidate Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.
Will the Epstein conspiracy finally lead to the downfall of Donald Trump?
We want to hear from you. Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au to be published in Crikey. Please include your full name. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
