From where I sit -- both lesbian and old -- Jeffrey Epstein seems such an obvious predatory creep (as does the Donald) that it is hard to imagine that he was able to pull off his sex capers with "voluntary" cooperation of even the most young, confused, and materially desperate girls. Their survival instincts should have said "run, don't walk, out of here." But Epstein did his business. He was slime -- as was and is his buddy-in-crime who has gone on to broader scale infamies.
(If you want to understand how Epstein, Maxwell, and Co. ever pulled off their schemes, I'd recommend Peggy Orenstein's Girls and Sex which describes well how the culture makes girls vulnerable to predators.)
So now we are living in the backwash of Epstein and the sprawling conspiracy theories his crimes have become a part of.
For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. ...
... As [James] Ball, [investigator of the QAnon conspiracy] puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal?
It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.
On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19.If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along.
If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map.
And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.
Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function.
If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”
Release the files now!
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