Trump has long promoted conspiracy nonsense. He deserves this ironic blowup

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Jul 24, 2025

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When you consider all the damnable behavior that congressional Republicans have meekly accepted from President Donald Trump — his frequent and blatant constitutional violations, his deranged cabinet appointments, his reckless dismantling of much of the federal government, and most of all what should have been the permanently disqualifying abomination of Jan. 6, 2021 — it’s ironic that the offense that finally shakes them from their sycophantic stupor and drives them to stand and challenge Trump revolves around what is very likely a fantasy.

All serious indications are that the “client list” of powerful men who the late wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein supposedly supplied with young girls doesn’t actually exist. At least, that’s the official conclusion of Trump’s own Justice Department, which also concludes that Epstein’s 2019 jail cell death was in fact suicide and not murder.

But don’t try telling that to the more dedicated disciples in Trump’s MAGA movement, including those in Congress. Their open fury at the Trump administration’s foot-dragging in releasing documents from the Epstein criminal case is a remarkable bit of schadenfreude, given Trump’s central role in spreading the conspiracy theory that he now cannot get his followers to release from their clenched jaws.

Good. Our conspiracist-in-chief richly deserves this unprecedented revolt. Trump is likely incapable of learning responsibility from even this startling blowup, but let it be a lesson to others who would weaponize dystopian lies for the sake of power, as Trump has done throughout his political career.

The most lie-prone president in America’s history has never limited his lies to pedestrian topics like election validity. Lie-wise, Trump has always reached for the stars. Or rather, the gutter.

His successful 2016 election campaign was built largely on the racist lie that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America. It was aided by his xenophobic lie of a violent crime wave by undocumented immigrants.

The list of loopy allegations Trump has made or promoted goes on and on: that the father of GOP primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz was involved in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; that a Democratic Party staffer was murdered in connection with Hillary Clinton’s email controversy; that a pizza parlor was headquarters for a pedophilia ring that included the Clintons. And on. And on. And on.

Trump’s role in spreading the Epstein conspiracy theory was especially nervy, because it always had the potential to blow up in his face.

Yes, Epstein was known to pal around with Bill Clinton in the past. That created an apparently irresistible (if baseless) tale for Trump to promote after Epstein was found dead in his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges: that it was actually murder, committed to prevent him from blackmailing powerful people, potentially including (goes the discredited theory) Clinton.

The problem is that Trump himself was one of those powerful people, cavorting with Epstein at various lavish properties back in the day. Trump told an interviewer in 2002 that Epstein is a “terrific guy” who “is a lot of fun to be with,” adding: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Despite that problematic personal history, Trump again pushed the Epstein murder conspiracy theory during last year’s campaign, promising to release classified documents if he was elected. As recently as February, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, told an interviewer that an Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now” awaiting review and public release.

But the Justice Department and the FBI recently signed off on a memo concluding there was no such list and no evidence Epstein was murdered. Then Bondi backtracked from her earlier “on my desk right now” comment and said there was actually no “client list” at all, and that she’d early been referring only to the general file in the criminal case.

As the MAGA faithful who’d bought into Trump’s earlier conspiracy-mongering cried foul, Trump and his gang reverted to form by offering up (what else?) different conspiracy theories.

Trump has dusted off his old fake claim that Obama conspired to manipulate intelligence related to Russian interference in the 2016 election — augmenting the claim this time with an AI-generated video showing Obama being arrested. Bondi has released a report related to that other old empty-suit controversy, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 emails.

Trump has even demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Redskins, an offering of culture-war candy that is an obvious attempt to distract his followers off the Epstein story, already.

It doesn’t seem to be working. On that point, we find ourselves in rare agreement with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and other MAGA members of Congress who are demanding that the Epstein files be opened. Not because we think the mythical client list is within, but because if it isn’t (and it probably isn’t), that might finally wake up Trump’s followers to the fact that he’s been lying to them all along — about this as about so much else.

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