Not since Jack Nicholson screamed, “You can’t handle the truth!”, at a young, unspoiled Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men has there been a meltdown like the ongoing imbroglio in Trumpworld, after the President’s Justice Department attempted to quash the conspiracy theories surrounding the arrest and suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. There was, they said, no secret client list, nor damning evidence of a coverup; Epstein was just your run-of-the-mill multi-millionaire sex criminal with powerful friends and a private island, who decided to take his own life rather than face the music after being arrested for sex trafficking in 2019.
To put it mildly, this declaration was not well received among the MAGA set. FBI deputy director Dan Bongino allegedly threatened to quit over the memo, former strategist Steve Bannon demanded an independent probe, and influencers and lawmakers alike were indignant at the suggestion that they move on from the scandal. The infighting got so bad that Trump stepped in to do damage control on Truth Social: “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD,” he wrote, “and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
Under ordinary circumstances, a scolding like this would have left the truthing masses duly chagrined. After all, Trump’s Truth Social posts are generally received like divine edicts handed down directly from God. But not this time; this time, for the first time in the platform’s history, Trump’s own people ratioed him into oblivion.
The MAGA base might have been willing to forgive Trump’s flip-flopping on matters of foreign policy or economic trade, but asking them to let Epstein go was something beyond reversal: a whiplash-inducing repudiation of the central ethos that won him their votes in the first place. This was because, even after having spent four years as president, Trump still didn’t seem like a political insider — nor did he campaign as one. What he promised was disruption: to drain the government swamp, to trim the government fat, and above all, to free the information kept under lock and key by government power brokers conspiring to hide the truth. That explicitly included the Epstein files, which Trump said in a 2024 Fox News interview he would release if elected — maybe not in their entirety, but “certainly about the way he died. It would be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation.”
To his supporters, Trump’s normal-guy curiosity about the Epstein thing — as well as his stated willingness to piss off powerful people in order to satisfy it — felt like a breath of fresh air, especially in the midst of a growing (admittedly accurate) suspicion that the then-President Joe Biden was basically a carefully stage-managed potato, one whose cognitive decline both the press and the Democratic Party had conspired to hide in one of the most brazen acts of political subterfuge since Watergate. And while the Left spent the remainder of 2024 warning voters that democracy was in danger, a plurality of American voters looked at the state of things and concluded that ship had long since sailed. Democracy was already a joke; the only question was which clown to put in the White House. At least Trump was promising to leave the door open, to let us all watch the show.
“To his supporters, Trump’s normal-guy curiosity about the Epstein thing felt like a breath of fresh air.”
Of course, such promises are all well and good for a person seeking power, but extremely inconvenient to whomever actually gets it. It’s easy to demand transparency when you’re on the outside looking in; not so much when you’re one of the creatures swimming around in the murk of the political petri dish. But Trump positioned himself persuasively as the exception to this rule, which makes his pivot from “I’ll show you everything” to “There’s nothing to see here” feel to many like an immense betrayal.
There has been much concern in MAGA world about how this might alienate the base for whom the Epstein conspiracy was not just a theory but a single issue of the voting-on variety. For many, the case seemed like a microcosm for corruption, rot, and the depravity of the upper class — many of whom were friends of Epstein, or even regular visitors to his private, pervert’s island, and who would have almost certainly been implicated in his various crimes if he hadn’t oh-so-conveniently committed suicide in his jail cell, while the cameras overlooking the corridor just happened to malfunction and the guards on duty accidentally fell asleep. A promise to release the Epstein files was catnip to a populist voting base who had long chafed at the sense of being forced to play by the rules that rich elites flouted with impunity.
What I find more intriguing, though, is how this conflict illuminates the limits of Trump’s own influence over the movement he created. The president inspires a passion in his supporters that no figure on the Left has come even close to matching. And yet, the MAGA response when their figurehead tells them to forget about Epstein has been not to comply, but to double down.
This is conspiracy theory as an article of faith: unshakeable, unfalsifiable, and invariably a kind of Kafkaesque trap for those who try to sow the seeds of doubt. The more they push, the more it proves that you were right all along. When they tell you there’s nothing to see here, well, that’s just what a political operative trying to cover up the Epstein client list, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, and the Roswell alien autopsy would say! That Trump himself has changed his tune just means somebody got to him; it just means this goes so much deeper than we ever knew.
It’s tempting to blame this state of affairs on our post-truth information landscape, where anything and everything can be (deep)faked, and what you believe to be real is highly dependent upon which siloed media ecosystem you’ve selected as your ideological home. But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation: that true belief, whether it’s religious or political, is infinitely adaptable — and once established, not easily dispelled. To sustain and be sustained by belief no matter how many holes the rationalist tries to poke in it: isn’t this the fundamental nature of faith?
In a country where church attendance has been declining for decades, people will look for other ways to feed their hunger for both mystery and meaning. And if politics is a poor substitute for spirituality, it has become one nonetheless. A shortcut for reckoning with complex moral questions, complete with its own rote catechism, its own orthodoxy enforced through unthinking repetition. This phenomenon is not new, of course; I was struck by it the first time I saw one of those “in this house we believe” signs in someone’s yard, as unmistakable an advertisement of faith as a cross-stitched Bible sampler on the living room wall or a mezuzah beside the front door. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the not-so-religious Right, the ones who have replaced prayer with shitposting, have created their own version: “In this house we believe Epstein didn’t kill himself.” (No, this doesn’t exist yet, I checked — although there is a flag.)
For those who saw the decline of organised religion as a sign that we were on the verge of a new enlightenment, one driven by rational inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and the scientific method, it has no doubt been disorienting to instead wake up in a world where “trust the science” has become a thought-terminating cliche in its own right, while membership of the church of Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself is millions strong and climbing.
But if we remain divided by ideology — which we cling to with all the ferocity of the most devout religious disciple — maybe we can also be collectively humbled by the one thing we obviously share, and always will: we all want to believe in something.
