Trump has only one way out of this scandal

I have been hopeful about the effect of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal on Donald Trump. It put a wedge between him and his supporters. With daylight between them, democracy has its best chance for survival in years.

But I should consider the less sunny side. Trump has escaped scandal before. The most famous and consequential came on January 6, 2021, when the president led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government. That was high treason. Yet here we are.

The best way out of the current mess is for the MAGA media to set aside their interests and unite around him. By “MAGA media,” I don’t mean all of the rightwing media apparatus, which includes Fox. Fox has already been trying to memory-hole the Epstein scandal, or make it seem to its viewers like it’s a Democrat thing, not a Trump thing.

By “MAGA media,” I mean that subterranean network of loosely connected Twitter accounts, podcasts and TikTok influencers who have made themselves an influential bloc of the Republican Party by repeating, advancing and expanding on well-known conspiracy theories, the most famous being QAnon, which is basically a 21st century update of the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion smear.

Altogether, the MAGA media told a story for 10 years about a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping (and Jewish) super-elites who pimp underage girls to the rich, and who otherwise conspire with enemies around the world, including “illegals,” to poison the blood of America.

Getting rid of immigrants was only part of the whole plan to make America great again. The president was also supposed to reveal the identities of the conspirators — that is, release the names on child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s client list — and bring them to justice. (By “justice,” I mean arresting, prosecuting and executing them in public.)

Trump was supposed to do that not only because some mysterious person, or persons, named QAnon said that he was supposed to, but also because all these MAGA media personalities were 100 percent invested. Their credibility as well as their livelihoods depended on the expectation that Trump would expose the conspiracy against America.

When Trump’s Department of Justice released a memo in early July saying there was no client list and that Epstein died by suicide, it sent shock waves through magaworld, to be sure, but it especially shocked these maga media personalities. It turned their investments to ash.

So whatever the president does now to recover from the Epstein scandal, it will be with an eye toward regaining the trust of these MAGA media personalities. And he can (probably) do that by giving them something to work with, which is to say, “information” that will affirm what their MAGA audiences already believe true about their enemies.

Which brings me to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice.

Yes, she’s a convicted child-sex trafficker who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison. Yes, she will say anything for a presidential pardon. And yes, whatever she says, it will be unbelievable, especially if she says Trump has nothing to do with Epstein’s ring of pedophiles.

But I think that’s a risk the president is willing to take given that Maxwell will provide “information” about, say, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, who MAGA world already believes guilty of the greatest crime.

With the lies, Trump can reunite the rightwing media apparatus back to a state in which it speaks so loudly and consistently that it drowns out legitimate fact-finding by the Washington press corps, thus turning the Epstein scandal into just another hoax by the fake news.

This gambit has a flaw, however. It presumes that these MAGA media personalities will be satisfied. I don’t think they will be, because satisfaction with “the truth” is hardly a hallmark of the MAGA mind. (Consider that billionaire Elon Musk has said that while the president has a four-year term, he will be around for the next four decades.)

To MAGA, enemies lurk behind every bush and tree. That’s why there’s so much cognitive dissonance among these people. The president can be the ultimate hero of the country as well as the ultimate victim of a conspiracy against the country. But it’s this desire for enemies that opens space for a question that Donald Trump doesn’t want to answer: Why did it take a presidential pardon to reveal the conspirators when the president has all the power he needs to reveal the conspirators?

And this gambit has another flaw. That’s Trump himself. He can’t keep his big mouth shut. This week, in a press conference aboard Airforce One, he said he ended his friendship with Epstein when Epstein poached workers from Mar-a-Lago. He then said one of them was the late Virginia Giuffre, perhaps Epstein’s best-known victim. She would have been a teen at the time she worked there. She killed herself in April.

So even as he hopes to draw attention away from himself by getting a convicted felon, Maxwell, to lie about people like Obama and Clinton, whom MAGA world already believes are guilty of the greatest crime, he can’t help it. He has to draw attention back to himself, thus bringing everyone’s attention back to him and Epstein, thus giving MAGA media personalities more material to work with.