So I mentioned in today’s BackChannel that it kind of beggared belief we were only hearing about these Wolff/Epstein interview tapes and their contents now. But then I heard from TPM Reader MH who said he remembered hearing some of the tapes. What? Readers get so confused. But then MH comes up with a link and it turns out the Daily Beast actually had a lot of this from Wolff and actually snippets of the audio tapes themselves. That came out just a few days before the 2024 election. Then I heard from TPM Reader JW about a podcast Wolff was doing at the time that went into the same stuff. (Okay, so part of my theory or reason for caution is out, I guess.) From what I can tell, all of this was sort of lost in the mad rush of the final days before the election and sort of became moot after it. In the standard way, the campaign said it was fake news and “election interference” and that was kind of it.
All this said, the Epstein wildfire engulfing MAGA just continues apace.
This is a bit hard to make sense of for what we might call normal people. As I noted in the BackChannel, there’s nothing clearly illegal alleged in anything Wolff described in those interviews. It’s just two sleazeball richies treating New York and South Florida, and everything between, as their private playground, bedding anything that moves and generally having a swell time, along with the standard bro-ish trash talking rivalries. Maybe there were underage women. But there’s nothing in Wolff’s account that says that or requires it. Trump has done, gotten caught dead to rights, doing so much worse. And of course, under the laws of Trump physics nothing matters. So, again, for normal people, how is it this thing that’s catching fire within his movement? And yet this Epstein thing is spreading out of control.
What I’m reminded of is something I noted in the first Epstein post last week: if you look with any clarity at the Epstein meta-story, it’s crystal clear that it’s PizzaGate. It’s like PizzaGate was an original treatment for the show that became “Epstein.” The rich and powerful men in Washington, Hollywood and Davos are actually all part of a child sex ring. And not just men — Crooked Hillary too. They’re all pedophiles. And it requires someone like Trump to provide a paroxysm of violent, purifying lustration where the evildoers are revealed and eliminated. Again, PizzaGate, “Epstein,” same thing.
Of course, it could be true that Epstein was running his own extortion ring or building his power by ensnaring rich and powerful men in compromising or criminal situations. But like all vast and great conspiracy theories, “Epstein” isn’t a big scandal. It’s a theory of society. People on Twitter and Bluesky are now pulling together the most liked and shared posts on Truth Social of Trumpers pleading with Trump, demanding that he shift gears, that he insist on revealing the evildoers, the rich and powerful pedophiles. The belief in the whole thing runs really, really deep.
I have a dear friend who is a TPM reader and has TPM-like politics but who lives culturally and geographically in the heart of MAGA land. He was telling me last week that if “Epstein” isn’t true — if the moral drama is broken — the whole of MAGA crumbles.
Look at this post from Mike Flynn, particularly the reference to “abuse of children by elites,” and I think the PizzaGate continuity is very clear. The iron belief that the “elites” are pedophiles is doctrine. “Epstein” was just the way the truth was finally going to come out.
I don’t think my friend meant MAGA would disappear precisely. He just meant to emphasize how deeply ingrained it is in the worldview of the whole movement. If “Epstein” isn’t true, or if Trump is on the wrong side of it, the whole thing devours itself. Or maybe it’s like when Captain Kirk outwitted the super computer and smoke started to pour out of it and it self-destructed. Let me be clear: I’m 100% not predicting the end of MAGA. I’m trying to explain for normal people why this, of all things, could ignite such a firestorm. It’s probably easier if you think of it as a foreign cargo cult with its own totems and theories of creation and apocalypse. Get some distance, etc.
In any case, point being that a lot of this information, at least the broad outlines, did come out at the tail end of the 2024 election. But perhaps none of it mattered then in the way it does now. Because now Trump has power to do the lustration, reveal everything and punish everyone. And he’s not.
