The Common Thread Between Epstein Denial and Climate Denial

For years, MAGA stalwarts have accused the deep state and/or Democrats of operating a clandestine child sex-trafficking ring that, according to some, involved Hillary Clinton eating babies in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant. Jeffrey Epstein—the convicted sex offender and Manhattan money manager who palled around with a who’s who of Republican and Democratic elites, and who was found dead in his cell in 2019, while awaiting trial for further charges—factored heavily into these theories. Epstein, of course, was an actually existing pedophile with actually existing ties to Democrats. For prominent right-wingers, this made him a more palatable cause to rally behind than made-up satanists and adrenochrome harvesters.

Historically, Donald Trump has been happy to humor MAGA’s more outlandish fantasies about Epstein. So have his associates. FBI Director Kash Patel has repeatedly contended that the Biden administration hid information about Epstein out of fear that it would implicate high-profile Democrats, and chided Congressional Republicans for failing to “let us know who the pedophiles are.” Patel, along with FBI Deputy Dan Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi, came into office promising to reveal, at long last, the truth on Trump’s behalf. Bondi went so far as to claim she had the Epstein “client list” sitting on her desk. They haven’t revealed much of anything. As anyone who’s recently spent even five minutes on the internet knows, earlier this week, the FBI and the Justice Department released an unsigned memo stating that their “exhaustive review” of materials related to Epstein found that no such list exists, and that Epstein, contrary to speculation that he was murdered, did indeed kill himself in 2019. In other words: Move on.

The ordeal has shocked and outraged Trump’s most fervent supporters, who feel betrayed by his failure to follow through on what amounted to a campaign promise. The fallout from the FBI and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s about-face—and Donald Trump’s own commitment to putting the issue to bed—may be the most serious threat yet to the unity of the Trumpist coalition. According to Trump himself, a longtime friend of Epstein’s, who called him a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with,” the suggestion that his government should release more information about the sex offender is a “SCAM,” that “we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” Trump is attempting to transform the conspiracy, in other words, from being a Democratic cover-up of damning information about Democrats’ associations with Epstein into a scheme engineered by the “Lunatic Left” and the “Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration” to con Trump’s supporters into turning on him.

It’s rare for Trump to rebuke his own supporters, but this specific line of attack—in which he claims that those demanding more documents on Epstein are “weaklings” falsely convinced of a plot cooked up by Democrats to advance radical leftist goals—follows a familiar playbook: namely, that of climate denial, which claims (among other things) that climate change is a plot cooked up by Democrats to advance radical leftist goals. Let’s call Trump’s new position Epstein Denial. Unfortunately for Trump, it’s not really working out for him.

In order to understand why a strategy that’s historically been so successful for Republicans is now tearing them apart, consider the function climate denial has had for the party. Republicans have spent years deriding policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incentivize renewable energy as “Green New Scams,” and long called climate change itself a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese government. The strategy, which has roots in the tobacco industry’s efforts to cover up the harm caused by its products, serves the material interests of reliable Republican donors in the fossil fuel industry. Although oil and gas executives have known for decades that their companies’ products contribute to global warming, they funded right-wing think tanks, advertising campaigns, and politicians spouting a contradictory array of talking points: that climate change isn’t real, is overblown, or is actually good.

Polluters want to keep making money from pollution, and politicians want to keep raking in their campaign donations. Helping their cause is the fact that the world runs on coal, oil, and gas. The project of rapidly deposing fossil fuels and erecting zero-carbon alternatives is a gargantuan, difficult undertaking. Embarking on that in earnest would pose an existential threat to the material interests of the planet’s most powerful industries, and could—without careful planning and coordination—bankrupt parts of this country and the many nations whose economies orbit around fossil fuel revenues.

Jeffrey Epstein was, by contrast, obviously not the power source that undergirds industrial capitalism but a math teacher at a fancy New York City private school who somehow accumulated a tremendous amount of wealth very quickly, with friends in high places. Trump and his peers’ reticence to discuss him seems similarly rooted in a lesser-order material benefit: They don’t want to be in any way connected to a disgusting, abusive creep.

The analogy between fossil fuels and Jeffrey Epstein isn’t perfect. Despite his well-documented ties to everyone from Bill Clinton to Prince Andrew to, of course, Donald Trump, neither the world nor the United States runs on Epstein. MAGA Republicans promised to drain the swamp and expose child-trafficking ghouls. Now, its God Hero is engaged in precisely the kind of cover-up it formerly pinned on Democrats.

Besides its rhetorical flourishes, the throughline between climate denial and Epstein denial is that the underlying harms at issue—catastrophic global warming, and decades of sexual abuse—are straightforwardly horrific. It boggles the mind to imagine that so many of the country’s most powerful people, Democrats and Republicans alike, spent decades either aware of or involved in crimes of that magnitude, looking the other way as victims continued to accumulate.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happened. Pictures show Donald Trump smiling next to Jeffrey Epstein, who hung out with him at parties throughout the 1990s. Epstein palled around with Larry Summers, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates, and Al Gore, and at one point described Trump—who even joked about Epstein’s preference for young girls—as his “closest friend.” Trump flew seven times on an Epstein-owned private jet known as the “Lolita Express,” frequented by a host of other luminaries, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Epstein died in prison while awaiting trial for federal sex-trafficking charges, and the tape the administration purports to show definitive proof of his suicide has nearly three minutes of missing footage. On Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported on a letter from Trump addressed to Epstein, commemorating his 50th birthday in 2003. The birthday well-wishing features the stylized image of naked woman. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” it reads, as part of an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein. “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Monied interests’ efforts to deny and downplay the reality of the climate crisis—and their own products’ role in fueling it—are just as scandalous. In 1988, an internal report from Shell projected that continuing to burn fossil fuels would lead atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to double by 2030, bringing about sea-level rise that could inundate entire low-lying countries. Such changes, Shell analysts warned, would “drastically change the way people live and work.” Even earlier, in 1982, Exxon foresaw “potentially catastrophic events.” Both companies continued lobbying against laws and regulations that would keep driving the world toward that future, and donate generously to Republican and Democratic politicians who’ll oppose them, too.

Whether you’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein’s offenses or the reality of climate change, in other words, plenty of damning evidence is already out in the open. You don’t have to possess an especially conspiratorial mind to see that members of both parties were at the very least chummy with a despicable sex criminal who died under questionable circumstances. Neither is it any great mystery why oil and gas companies shelled out handsome sums to deflect attention away from their disastrous contributions to global warming, and enlist Republicans and Democrats alike in their cause. With any luck, Trump’s disastrous handling of the Epstein affair will fatally dismember the MAGA coalition, and they won’t be fooled by his last-ditch, cherry-picking effort to release grand jury testimony. Unfortunately, a large-scale reckoning with the conspiracy that’s continuing to fuel the climate crisis will be harder to come by.