The Brooklyn Rail

“May every day be another wonderful secret,” wrote Trump in Jeffrey Epstein’s 50^th birthday book in 2003, and they both had many days of secrets to come, and a significant portion of them were spent together. There is now evidence that Trump knew at least as early as 1992 what Epstein was up to “in secret.” In 2002, Trump described Epstein as “a terrific guy,” and someone who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” He now says he broke with Epstein when his friend “stole” a 16-year-old masseuse named Virginia Giuffre, a very troubled girl, from Trump’s spa at Mar-a-Lago, where Ghislaine Maxwell found her and began to groom the girl as a sex slave. Virginia Giuffre later pursued criminal and civil actions against Epstein and Maxwell, and became a vocal advocate of justice for survivors of sex trafficking. Documents from her civil suit against Maxwell detailing the Epstein/Maxwell operation were released to the public on August 9, 2019. The next day, Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, where he was awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges. Virginia Giuffre killed herself last April, at the age of 41.

When Epstein was finally arrested and indicted for some of his crimes, US attorney Alex Acosta got him off with a sweetheart deal in 2007, reducing sixty federal crimes to zero, in favor of lesser state crimes. Trump then rewarded Acosta for helping his friend by making Acosta his Secretary of Labor in 2017. And last month, Trump’s number two at the Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (who was formerly a defense lawyer for Trump), met privately with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors. Immediately after their meeting, Maxwell was moved to a Club-Fed-type prison, in return for keeping quiet about Trump’s involvement in the Epstein/Maxwell operation. If Trump now pardons Maxwell, or gets her sentence reduced to house arrest, will Trump supporters finally stand up?

This isn’t about Trump being a playboy in his youth. It’s not even about him being credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, and adjudicated a rapist in a federal court. It’s about him being best buddies with two of the worst serial sex offenders in history, that were operating a massive sex trafficking ring when he knew them, possibly under Trump’s protection. US Attorney Damian Williams said that Ghislaine Maxwell’s 20-year sentence held her accountable for “perpetrating heinous crimes against children.” And Trump is now protecting her and trying to exonerate her. Why does most of MAGA world seem willing to look the other way on this?

QAnon, which began in October 2017, believed that Donald Trump was chosen to wage a secret battle against dark forces, including a cabal of pedophiles and child sex traffickers, all liberal elites in Hollywood, government, and banking. In various permutations, this became the main narrative of conspiracy theorists on the Right, and when Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, that conspiracy fused with QAnon. As this constitutive narrative turns inside out and backwards, it is causing a big problem for Trump, even though at this point he has made himself legally and electorally virtually untouchable. His attempts to now quash the Epstein scandal as a liberal hoax have been ineffectual, and he has consequently turned against his base: “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump said on Truth Social on July 16. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”

As he has often done, Trump deflected attention away from his own crimes by accusing others of those same crimes, and the Epstein conspiracy was his deflective magnum opus. He built the Epstein case into a principal right-wing conspiracy theory involving powerful liberal elites abusing children and getting away with it because the justice system and the Deep State were biased to overlook their crimes. That theory has now been proven false, and Trump has scrambled to offer other explanations, including that the entire Epstein case, from beginning to end, has been a hoax perpetrated by liberals in order to slander him. This absurd reversal is causing a crisis of belief and conscience on the part of sincere Trump supporters.

After a thousand FBI agents were ordered to review 100,000 pages of the Epstein files, working around the clock in 24-hour shifts, charged with flagging every occurrence of Trump’s name in the records, they were then directed to redact Trump’s name from the files. The imperious rationale for this cover-up was that Trump’s appearance in the records constituted an “unwarranted invasion of privacy.”

Most of this cover-up is going on in plain sight. Everything Trump says about the case reinforces his guilt. Trump promised his supporters transparency, especially about the Epstein files. Why aren’t they demanding it now? Why aren’t they standing up now? Is it because, as they used to say in Bulgaria, “The Devil has the people by the throat?” Are they so traumatized by their own abusers that they cannot tell who is who anymore? And are they so battered by conspiracy theories that they can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood on a very basic level?

Judging from the trial records, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell picked certain girls out and lured them in with offers of employment, travel, and education. Maxwell began the process by making first contact with the girls and putting them at ease. She convinced them that she had their best interests at heart and they could trust her. She was very understanding about their past experiences with abuse and drew on those experiences to manipulate the girls, telling them she was the only one who could help them. She became their pimp. By the time they realized that she actually detested them and thought of them as stupid disposable objects to be used and discarded, it was too late.

One of the lawyers for Annie Farmer, who testified at Maxwell’s trial, has called for the government to release the more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence that it possesses, after redacting victim information. She also said that any attempt to redact third party names of participants and co-conspirators from this data would amount to a cover-up. There are a lot more individuals and institutions that should be brought to justice in this case. The conspiracy that is going on now, directed by Trump, is very real.

One thing that has to happen now is that the public needs to hear the testimonies of some of the one thousand victims of the Epstein/Maxwell operation. Perhaps that will help to break this infernal spell.