Trump’s attempt to quell the Epstein list rebellion further ignites the MAGA movement

The “Streisand effect” describes the moment when someone, usually someone powerful, tries to bury damaging information and achieves exactly the opposite: it makes the world talk about it nonstop. Popular culture owes this phrase to the singer Barbra Streisand, who once tried to prevent the publication of a photo of her oceanfront home that illustrated the consequences of development on the erosion of the California coast. She only succeeded in intensifying public scrutiny.

The penultimate victim of the Streisand effect is Donald Trump. The U.S. president has spent a week trying his best to keep everyone from talking about the Epstein list, but to no avail: with each new attempt to bury it, it emerges stronger.

Last weekend, he politely asked his people — his “boys” and “gals,” he wrote in a message on his Truth Social platform — to drop the matter once and for all and just accept the explanations from the Department of Justice, whose head, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been saying for days that “there’s nothing to see here.”

But even one of Trump’s most loyal and influential “boys,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, on Tuesday joined the chorus of voices calling for “transparency” over the information held by authorities about Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire pedophile who hanged himself in a New York prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for child sex trafficking. “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it,” the Republican congressman said in an interview with Benny Johnson, the famous right-wing podcaster.

Conspiracy theories surrounding both the circumstances of Epstein’s death and his files — a collection of flight logs from his private jet, criminal case materials, and a black notebook listing alleged clients that arguably demonstrates the existence of a global elite dedicated to child trafficking — have fueled the imagination of the MAGA movement for years. They’ve also fueled the ideology of QAnon, whose followers are perfectly capable of believing that the coronavirus was invented to inject the population with microchips designed to control it, or that Democratic elites kidnap children to extract their blood and obtain a drug called adrenochrome that promises immortality.

The difference between the wild years of opposition to the Biden administration and these six months of the second Trump administration is that the people who fanned these theories from the fringes have now moved to the center. They are either in government or belong to the same club of officials now urging everyone to forget all about Epstein.

Two of the most prominent believers in the Epstein theories are (or were) FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bognino. The FBI seal was one of two that adorned the document leaked a couple of Sundays ago (the other one was from the Department of Justice) with two conclusions: Epstein’s compromising list of powerful men in Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street does not exist, and he committed suicide in prison, because, as two nearly 11-hour videos made public last week aim to prove, no one crossed his cell door the night he died.

According to the technology magazine Wired, after examining the metadata, three minutes are missing from that video footage, and good luck explaining that one to the tribe of those unwilling to believe official versions.

Both Patel and Bognino had sworn in the past that they would not stop until they knew all the secrets about Epstein, so having to accept the official version now is not a pleasant experience, especially for Bognino, who, before taking up his position, had a podcast where he fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories.

Those close to him have framed the crisis — and his threatened resignation — as a dilemma: it’s either him or Attorney General Bondi, who has gone in just a few days from being a star of the MAGA movement for her cold, merciless style at the head of the Department of Justice, to becoming its number one enemy for supposedly protecting all those alleged pedophiles, the rich and famous, and who knows, maybe also Trump, who was a friend of Epstein in his heyday.

Defending Pam Bondi

The president has repeatedly defended his attorney general. He did so again on Tuesday, praising her “great work.” A reporter asked him if Bondi had specified whether his name appeared on the Epstein list, given their shared past, as evidenced by photographs and videos from the era. “No, no. She’s given us just a very quick briefing, and in terms of the credibility in the things they have seen. These files were made up by [former FBI director James] Comey, Obama, they were made up by the Biden — we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all of the different things we’ve had to go through,” Trump replied, perhaps confident that no one would remember that Epstein was indicted and died in 2019, when he was president, and that it all stems from a case dating back to 2005, when neither Comey, Obama nor Biden were in a position to invent anything about it.

Last week, Trump lost his temper at a cabinet meeting when he was asked about the disgraced financier. “Are you still talking about him?” he replied. “There’s been a lot of talk about this guy for years.” On Tuesday, he offered another version of that argument: “I don’t understand what the interest and what the fascination is. I really don’t. And the credible information has been given. It’s pretty boring stuff.”

Bondi, for her part, had appeared before the press a couple of hours earlier, her expression tense and her half-smile frozen. She had come to talk about her department’s achievements in the fight against drug trafficking, but was bombarded with questions about Epstein. She repeatedly refused to comment on the matter, and then said she trusted Trump would not withdraw his confidence: “I’m going to be here as long as the president wants me here, and I believe he’s made that crystal clear it’s four years.”

If Trump thought his weekend social media post to calm the MAGA waters was going to settle the matter, he wasn’t thinking about Barbra Streisand. Since his administration released the two-page document attempting to settle the suspicions, his social media posts have been responded to by angry users demanding explanations, rather than by his abundant tribe of followers.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the matter is seeing how news networks critical of Trump (CNN and MSNBC), which have spent years combating conspiracy theories about Epstein, are now using these theories to attack the president from an unexpected flank discovered within the MAGA movement.

The Democrats suddenly feel like strange bedfellows for these ultra-right ideologues. Their House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, this week called for the release of documents related to the case.

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