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THE vision of Donald Trump being hoist on his own petard is wondrous to behold. The US president’s palpable panic as significant segments of his base revolted against what they saw as the Trump administration’s betrayal in denying a foundational belief of the ‘make America great again’ (MAGA) movement was revealing.
Trump’s reputation as a fantasist who had trouble telling the truth was established long before he entered politics a decade ago. It may not have mattered very much back when he was little more than a property tycoon who turned up on the social pages among the rich and famous, spouting the kind of inanities to which we have now become more accustomed.
He wasn’t really politically partisan until the Obama presidency, and was initially seen as a bit of a joke even when he entered the presidential campaign in 2015. But his grip on the popular imagination turned out to be more firm than that of his fellow Republican rivals. Even Trump did not expect to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 (his task might have been harder if the Democratic establishment had not nobbled Bernie Sanders).
His first win suffices as a damning indictment of the Democrats’ decision to double down on neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad post-2008, but it’s truly amazing that they effectively gifted the presidency to Trump once more last year after replacing him four years earlier with a doddering veteran of the ruling elite, and initially expecting the octogenarian Joe Biden to pull off a second win despite overwhelming evidence of his diminishing intellectual acuity.
Trump can’t help complicating his travails.
There’s something pathetic about how the Democrats have now latched on to the Epstein files saga as a means of undermining the second Trump presidency. If they cannot come up with better arguments, next year’s half-term elections might leave the Republicans in charge of both the executive and legislative wings of government, along with a stranglehold on the supreme court — a phenomenon that has put paid to the checks-and-balances arrangement favoured by the framers of the constitution.
Trump and Jeffery Epstein, the financier and eventually convicted paedophile at the centre of the scandal the president is trying to live down, moved in the same social circles and were friends for over a decade before a falling out in 2004 over — what else? — property and women. Years before he became president, Trump told New York magazine in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Two years earlier, Epstein’s chief procurer, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, recruited a 17-year-old spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Virginia Giuffre, as a masseuse. Giuffre, the most prominent among the whistleblowers in this sordid saga, who died by suicide in April, had told the BBC that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among Epstein’s associates, who in her case, included Prince Andrew.
The MAGA world doesn’t care much about British royalty, but holds firm to the belief that the Epstein tale conceals an international paedophile network that was deployed to manipulate governments via blackmail. There have been dark hints about a Mossad connection with Epstein. Maxwell’s dad, Robert, a Czech-born British media tycoon, was closely associated with the Israeli establishment. There is no clear evidence of any such conspiracy, but when have facts dissuaded the MAGA faithful from believing whatever fits into their worldview?
The trouble this time is that Trump and some of his leading associates — including Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino — promised to liberate all the information from the so-called Epstein files, but are now claiming there is nothing to see. Bondi now insists there’s no such thing as a client list, after announcing back in February that it was sitting on her desk.
Trump has sued The Wall Street Journal and its proprietor Rupert Murdoch for claiming that he contributed an erotic drawing to a scrapbook Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003, while at the same time requesting the release of “pertinent” court documents pertaining to the Epstein case. It remains to be seen whether these probably meaningless gestures will suffice to mollify the MAGA base, some of whose stalwarts might have finally begun to realise that Trump is just another component of the reprobate elite he purportedly seeks to disempower.
That much ought to have been obvious from his first six months of actions that punish the poor and further enrich the billionaires. As a social media with quipped, if there’s any justice in this world, Big Beautiful Bill will be the name of Trump’s eventual cellmate.
Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2025
