People in some of the most avid spaces of Donald Trump fandom are growing impatient. No, not because he utterly failed on his promise to lower grocery prices on "day one" of his administration, instead ordering tariffs that will almost certainly make goods more expensive. Nor because he failed to end the war in Ukraine in "24 hours," as promised. And not because instead of canceling "Crooked Joe’s electric vehicle mandate," as promised, Trump ended up hawking Teslas from the White House lawn, to placate his benefactor Elon Musk.
No, the MAGA faithful are furious because they expected Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the "Epstein files." The hope is that the files will finally fulfill the QAnon prophecy of Trump revealing Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks as blood-drinking Satanists, leading to the mass arrests of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and anyone else they don't like. The imagined list of who will be exposed as a child-murdering pedophile varies from conspiracy theorist to conspiracy theorist, but the basic faith remains the same: the Justice Department is sitting on files showing that deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had a "client list" that Trump would soon release, proving their most depraved fantasies true.
Since his first run for president, Trump has avoided contentious issues by promising his answer is "two weeks" away.
As the horrific economic and human consequences of Trump's second term start to manifest, the administration knows they need to keep the conspiracy theorists fed more than ever, lest the MAGA base starts asking hard questions about why prices are rising and Grandma's Social Security check is missing. So Bondi set out to give the "Epstein files" weirdoes some candy. The problem is that, while Epstein was indeed a monstrous sex predator, there is no "client list." Journalist Julie Brown, whose award-winning work with the Miami Herald uncovered the extent of Epstein's crimes, said as much on X: "There is no Jeffrey Epstein client list. Period. It's a figment of the internet's imagination — and a means to just slander people." The names of Epstein's associates — including Trump — are already public knowledge. Most of those people aren't implicated in his crimes, however.
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To placate the QAnon crowd, Bondi brought a bunch of MAGA influencers to the White House and had them pose with binders labeled "Epstein Files." When it turned out there was nothing new in the folders, however, the conspiracists unloaded their rage at Bondi. Since then, she's been trying to convince them she has a "truckload" of files she will soon release, but nothing's been released. Since then, major MAGA influencers from Russell Brand to Laura Loomer have cried foul. One influencer with nearly 180,000 X followers, Philip Anderson, declared, "Pam Bondi, arrest Democrat criminals or resign."
It's easy to see why they're so frustrated that Bondi won't simply falsify some documents. After all, making stuff up is what conspiracy theorists do all day. Bondi's boss, Trump, also thinks nothing of lying, claiming to have "evidence" of various conspiracies, when he has no such thing. Elon Musk is on X all day, making up numbers and pretending to have government documents that don't exist. Bondi certainly has no moral qualms about misleading people, which is why she backed Trump's 2020 "stolen election" lie. I suspect, however, that fabricating evidence of a crime to frame prominent Democrats like the Clintons or the Obamas is a tougher task.
It sure is a sticky situation, so the administration finally caved and rolled out Trump himself to deal with it. The president went on the podcast of Sharyl Attkisson, a former journalist with a new conspiracy theorist career. She asked about the "Epstein files," along with other conspiracies Trump falsely promised "information" on, adding, "That’s one of the most often questions I’ve been asked."
Trump gave one of his dithering non-answers, claiming both that "I haven’t heard too much about it," but also, "the bottom line is the records are getting out." When Attkisson asked when, he hesitantly answered, "I would say weeks, yeah — I would say weeks."
Ah yes, the "two weeks" tactic, which is a long-standing favorite of Trump's. Since his first run for president, Trump has avoided contentious issues by promising his answer is "two weeks" away. During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly dodged questions about banning abortion, restricting contraception, or repealing Obamacare with lies about how he'll soon be "announcing" his best ever, most fabulous policy that would fix all problems in "the next 14 days." The announcements never came, but the strategy worked because Trump could count on the press to forget that he was asked, allowing him to play this game forever.
Will the same strategy work on his base? Sadly, it probably will, but not because they'll move on. It's because they will never give up hope in the "Epstein files."
Conspiracy theorists are notorious for keeping the faith that they will be proved right, no matter how often they are disappointed or proved wrong. QAnon has generated reams of "prophecies" that have never come to pass. Believers keep hanging in, sure that any day now, Trump will finally unleash "The Storm," their term for the long-promised day the Satanic pedophile conspiracy is revealed and all the Democratic leaders will be arrested.
Still, there is a danger for Trump of losing these people, but to boredom, not facts. If not fed constant promises of dramatic revelations, conspiracy theorists can start drifting away from their cults. Trump understands this need for constant stimulation, which is why he's manipulating his base with false assurances that the good stuff is coming any day now. He's playing the same game with the release of a trove of documents about the Kennedy assassination late Tuesday. Trump even made a joke, which will go over his followers' heads, about how this is a distraction meant to occupy their time: "“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading." When these files inevitably prove to be underwhelming, Trump will simply make up new lies about other "documents" and exciting "exposes," stringing his followers along into infinity.
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Trump does this not only due to the sadistic glee he gets from conning his followers, though I have no doubt that's a big part of his motivation. He is no doubt fully aware that, without people whose brains have been fried with online disinformation, his base of power would dramatically shrink. As I detailed after the election, the best predictor of whether someone voted for Trump was how entrenched they were in the world of social media misinformation and conspiracy theories. New analysis released this week by Blue Rose Research confirms it. Reality-based citizens who got their information from legitimate news sources voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. But if people get most of their information from sources like TikTok — where nonsense about the "Epstein files," anti-vaccine myths, and demonic possession outperforms staid news reports about the economy — they broke big time for Trump.
Trump cannot legally run for president again (not that he cares about the law), but he still needs to keep millions of people in a constant state of delusion. His actual policies are dramatically unpopular. Voters are starting to panic over Musk's assault on the federal government, which is threatening basic services like Social Security. If people stop paying attention to nonsense like the "Epstein files" and start focusing on the real world, they would start to pressure Republicans to do something to stop Trump before he wrecks the economy. He needs to keep folks distracted, and if yelling "Kennedy" and "Epstein" is what it takes, well, Trump knows the score. He can keep these people waiting "two weeks" for files that will never come.
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