Now Trump Says Forget Jeffrey Epstein

He urges MAGA to give up a conspiracy tale that he and his allies promoted.

Donald Trump has traded in conspiracy stories for years: Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Ted Cruz’s father had a link to JFK’s killer. The 2020 election was stolen. Migrants are barbecuing people’s pets. He seems to think this is good show business, with appeal in certain niches of a fragmented culture.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.) holds up a photo of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein during a House committee meeting in Washington, 2024.

Yet now he’s upset that the Jeffrey Epstein theories he fanned are proving hard to tamp down. Mr. Trump lamented online Saturday that his Administration is taking heat “over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.” His advisers are suggesting this was a snipe hunt, but the MAGA base is in furious disbelief, since the same people pledged to catch some snipe.

Asked on a podcast in 2024 about Epstein’s “list of clients,” Mr. Trump said he’d have “no problem” releasing it. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that “it’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” FBI Director Kash Patel has been on this beat, too. “Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are,” he told a podcast two years ago.

But Ms. Bondi’s and Mr. Patel’s review “revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the Justice Department and FBI said last week. At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, the AG insisted that in February she only meant the Epstein case files were on her desk. Alleged videos, she said, “turned out to be child porn downloaded” by Epstein. Mr. Patel, wearing official FBI big boy pants, agrees. “If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island, and I’m in charge,” he recently said, “don’t you think you’d see it?”

The Trump Administration backs the assessment that Epstein killed himself in prison. But the jailhouse tape it released has a minute gap near midnight. Ms. Bondi said it’s a daily glitch, when the aging surveillance system resets. Yet to conspiracy raconteurs, it’s one more clue. Nothing will satisfy them, because they live in a world of storytelling, not evidence.

Maybe podcast provocateurs think it’s fun to spin joking-not-joking yarns about Taylor Swift rigging the Super Bowl to help President Biden. What about the truth? By the way, Mr. Trump now says the Epstein furor can’t distract Ms. Bondi from the real conspiracy: “The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024—That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more.”