There’s something very fishy about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
I’m not talking about just the scandal itself, which, of course, remains incredibly fishy. We don’t know where Jeffrey Epstein got his gigantic oodles of money from in the first place. We don’t know who he was trafficking to, if anyone besides himself. We don’t know a lot of things about Jeffrey Epstein.
What I am talking about is the response to Jeffrey Epstein. Many of the figures who have been largely associated with the question-asking about Jeffrey Epstein were, in fact, associates of Jeffrey Epstein.
This is where things start to get weird in Conspiracy Land, because Conspiracy Land suggests that there are the people who are in on the conspiracy, and then there are the people who are outside attempting to crack the code on the conspiracy.
But when you are talking about a hoax — and I’m not saying that everything associated with Jeffrey Epstein is a hoax — I’m talking about the political optics directed at President Trump, specifically regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the ways you can tell when people are in on the hoax is when they themselves were close associates of the person at issue, and now they’ve decided to try and weaponize that same person as a weapon against the people whom they are targeting.
Case in point: Steve Bannon. I’ve known Steve for a very, very long time, having first met him in 2012 — Steve Bannon is not the easiest human being, to put it mildly.
Steve Bannon has a long history of attempting to associate himself with more powerful people, glomming on to them, and then making his way up the chain. He made a documentary about then-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann; after that documentary was made, he then used that as an entry card to make a documentary about Sarah Palin. After that documentary was made, he then used that as an entry card to make a documentary about Andrew Breitbart. He used that documentary in order to become a prominent person at Breitbart itself.
Andrew tragically passed away, and then Bannon used that position in order to leverage a position for himself in the first Trump administration. He ended by being ousted by the first Trump administration; President Trump, rather famously, called him “Sloppy Steve.”
Bannon then went through a period in the wilderness where he was associating with some rather shady figures. He ended up doing a very short stint of jail time. And now he has his show, “The War Room,” where the media call him up routinely for quasi-leaks — I’m not sure how really empowered his access is to the administration — but the media is constantly using him as a window into the supposed dark side of the Trump administration, which is something that he really loves.
The reason that Steve has become an issue is because Steve — along with many other people who are attempting to wrest control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump — is making the assumption that President Trump is in the waning days of his political power, that President Trump is now close to being, if he is not already, a lame duck.
That means that the future of the Republican Party is going to be fought in an internal war, which will involve a war of people who have different perspectives on foreign policy and economics. Steve presumably believes that he is going to have a heavy voice in deciding the future of the MAGA movement without President Trump.
Let me be clear: There is no MAGA movement without President Trump. It does not exist. President Trump is MAGA. President Trump, as I have said before, is sui generis. It is the president of the United States who decides the direction of MAGA.
Every attempt to intellectualize or philosophize about President Trump, to turn his impulses, his instincts into a coherent political program, has failed. Why? Because the president holds a bunch of different, conflicting thoughts at the same time, and then he tends to come down on the side of pragmatic populism. He will try things. If they don’t work, he will then move away from them. He is not ideological.
Thus, any attempt to peg President Trump to a “MAGA ideology” is destined to fail because President Trump could, for example, at one point articulate a version of MAGA in which support for Ukraine is bad, and then, when Russia is intransigent, articulate a version of MAGA in which support for Ukraine is good.
President Trump is not just the leader of MAGA. He is the definition of MAGA. There is no MAGA aside from President Trump. He’s very much like Barack Obama in this way. Barack Obama was able to kind of gloss over all of the various divisions inside the Democratic Party without a necessarily cohesive program. All attempts to boil Trump down into a philosophical or ideological package, which can then be transferred over to another candidate, whether that candidate is JD Vance or Ted Cruz or Steve Bannon or anyone else, are bound to fail because President Trump is too big for that.
You can’t just take what Trump is, shrink-wrap it, put it in an ideological box, and then hand it over to the next guy.
One of the things that Steve Bannon has been trying to do for years is claim that he’s the intellectual mover and shaker behind MAGA, which is silly. There is no shadow president to President Trump. There is no one who is defining Trump’s program except for President Trump.
The reason I bring this up is because Steve Bannon is one of many other people opposed to some elements of Trump’s agenda and trying to run a bizarre operation inside the Republican Party to remove support from Trump and move it over to his version of MAGA.
He, among other people, has been quite vocal about the so-called Epstein scandal. He’s been very vocal about this. He’s talked about it a lot.
But it turns out, again, that so much of what is happening right now is just fibbery. February. According to The Guardian:
Hundreds of texts over almost a year show Maga influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Remember, that’s 2018, ten years after Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction, after the controversial plea deal that he cut with Alex Acosta.
We’re not talking about Donald Trump hobnobbing with Jeffrey Epstein in the late 90s. We’re not talking about going to parties with Jeffrey Epstein in Mar-A-Lago in 2004. We are talking about the fact that ten years after it was obvious to everyone that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile, Bannon was acting not just as a friend, but as a confidante and PR advisor.
Which says something about somebody.
If you’re acting as a confidante and PR adviser to a convicted sex offender like Jeffrey Epstein, who was well-known to be into underage girls, I don’t know what that says about you or why you should have any level of authority in any future Republican Party.
The Guardian continued:
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Bannon conspiratorially described the renewed scrutiny of Epstein as a “sophisticated op”, and over time he counseled Epstein in his adversarial responses to media outlets, the justice system and his victims.
All the while, both men were also strategizing how best to promote Bannon’s rightwing populist agenda, and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump. In all of Epstein’s messages, the identity of his correspondent is redacted. But Bannon’s identity in the threads cited in this reporting is clear from contextual clues including his documented activities at the time, details of his business and media pursuits, and other disclosures. In one document, the sender’s phone number is not redacted – and it is the same number linked to Bannon in a legal case against Trump adviser Roger Stone. …
The men were discussing Epstein’s problems even before he came to broader public awareness as a notorious sex criminal with odd connections to the Trump administration. Bannon left the Trump White House in late summer 2017, but enjoyed a vibrant career as a Maga influencer. On 22 June 2018, days after Epstein had been the focus of an anti-Trump protest at a Trump speech, the men began discussing the scandal that was beginning to loom over Epstein.
At first they treated it as a publicity problem, with Bannon seeing it as an orchestrated campaign. … Bannon asked Epstein: “Who is running this op on u something serious going on.” Epstein replied: “First a protest at Clinton and then at trump. Lots of people very angry at our friendship.” Bannon responded: “It’s an op dude – I do this for a living – the pieces that are dropping are deeply researched,” adding: “This is sophisticated op.”
They were having these back-and-forths in which Bannon was attempting to guide Epstein. We know for a fact that there are hours and hours of tape between Epstein and Bannon that have not yet been released, which is strange.
What does this mean? It means that certain people are less trustworthy than others in political media.
And the fact that Steve Bannon has spent his entire career trying to find more powerful people to advise and glom onto in order to advance his own agenda says something about him and about his attempts to hijack the MAGA movement beyond President Trump.