A feeding frenzy finally feasts on Trump

The master of media manipulation can’t get clear of Epstein.

When a politician gets away with lying about a pandemic, stealing government records, and attempting a coup to overthrow democracy, it would be natural to assume that the politician is invulnerable to public scrutiny – that journalism is useless against his corruption.

But something extraordinary has happened to Donald Trump in the last two weeks. Some of his most fanatical followers have turned against him over the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, and his botching of the issue has emboldened an often timid news media to keep the story front and center.

Ironically, the flurry of coverage recalls facts about the Trump-Epstein friendship that have been publicly known for years but were often underplayed by the same news outlets that are now making them prominent.

The uproar has given defenders of democracy hope that the accountability that Trump has long eluded may catch up to him after all – or at least lower his public approval numbers enough that he may feel forced to scale back some of his most cruel and reckless policies.

MAGA brought this on itself. For Trump supporters, the Epstein case has been a prime example of how powerful people cover up for other powerful people who do terrible things. And they weren’t wrong about that. But the MAGA cult overlooked Trump’s past friendship with Epstein and didn’t mind that Trump’s first-term Labor secretary was Alex Acosta, a former prosecutor who made a secret, lenient deal with Epstein in 2008.

Five months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News that Epstein’s sex-trafficking client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Then two weeks ago, her Justice Department announced that there was no such thing as an Epstein client list.

Indeed, there probably is not such a list. The most accomplished journalist covering the Epstein scandal, Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, wrote earlier this year: “Those who have worked with the FBI on the case for decades say there is no evidence Epstein kept a ledger or a list of clients who were involved with his sex trafficking operation.”

But when the Trump regime played bait-and-switch, it violated a cardinal rule for his cult: Don’t mess with our conspiracy theories. Among those infuriated with Trump were shameless hoaxster Alex Jones and neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes. Even sycophantic House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has surrendered congressional power to Trump, called for the White House to “put everything out there” on Epstein.

The suspicion, among both progressives and the far right, is that putting everything out there – about 100,000 documents, by one estimate – would include multiple mentions of Trump.

Perhaps most startling in this new eruption of the Epstein scandal is Trump’s reaction to it. The con artist who has proven so adept at changing the subject has dwelled on this one, extending the story for day after day after day.

Trump demanded that his followers stop talking about it, which only made more people talk about it. (This is known as the “Streisand effect,” a term coined after singer Barbra Streisand sued to get a photo of her mansion removed from an online archive of California coastal photos. At the time of the suit, the photo had been downloaded six times, including twice by Streisand’s lawyers. In the month after the suit, it attracted 400,000 views.)

Trump made the situation even worse by saying Epstein documents in federal possession were “made up” by former FBI Director James Comey and Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Even some diehard Trump backers probably saw through that one.

Plenty of damning information was already known about the Epstein-Trump relationship before this new explosion of interest. They were close friends for at least a decade. Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked females “on the younger side.” One of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, was recruited by Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, while the 17-year-old was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. (Giuffre ended her own life last April.) And Epstein died – by his own hand, officials say – while he was in a federal prison under the ultimate responsibility of the president at that time: Trump.

As the story has gained momentum in recent days, new facts have emerged.

Wired revealed that video taken near Epstein’s cell failed to show almost three minutes of what happened, not the “missing minute” that officials had acknowledged.

Also, Sen. Dick Durbin said he had received information that about 1,000 FBI personnel had been assigned to go through all Epstein documents and “were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

Another new wrinkle was a report by the Wall Street Journal – part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire – that a “birthday book” for Epstein in 2003 had well wishes from his friends, including Trump. The message attributed to Trump included a drawing of a naked woman and noted that he and Epstein had “certain things in common.”

Trump denied the report and sued Murdoch and the Journal, creating an unusual confrontation between the founder of Fox News and the president whose ascendancy can be largely attributed to Fox.

Murdoch and Trump have not always gotten along, but they’ve been mutually supportive in their business and political dealings as they monetize fascism. The lawsuit against Murdoch creates another ongoing source of news linking Trump and Epstein, when the last thing Trump needs is more news on the subject.

Along with Trump’s missteps, another surprise has been how eager the mainstream media have been to cover the Trump-Epstein scandal. It’s a feeding frenzy comparable to how they broke the big news that Joe Biden was old.

Is it too much coverage? I’m not going to say that. I think they’re making up for not spending enough energy on the story in the past. And if the world’s most dangerous man finally gets trapped in quicksand, I’m not going to throw him a rope.

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