With Donald Trump in Scotland touring his two golf courses, he faces the grim specter of returning to the U.S. where his ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is front and center –– and he has only himself to blame.
According to analysis by the New York Times’ Peter Baker, Trump’s entire political career has been predicated on conspiracy-mongering, starting with questioning whether President Barack Obama’s citizenship, and he has piled on more and more since his first term.
Now the distrust he has created is “consuming”: his presidency as even some of his more ardent supporters have grown suspicious about his possible involvement in human sex trafficking.
As Baker wrote, “Washington is awash in conspiracy theories these days, a cascade of suspicion and intrigue promoted or denied in the Oval Office, ricocheting around Capitol Hill and cable news and propelled at warp speed across social media,” adding that the president is now coming “full-circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory.”
Pointing out that it “says something about the evolution of politics in the Trump era that a sexual predator who has been dead for six years could suddenly dominate the national conversation again with little new information to change the essential understanding of the case,” Baker noted this was the inevitable result of Trump’s use of conspiracies to feed red meat to his MAGA base.
According to presidential scholar Michael Nelson of Rhodes College, “There seems to be a natural human tendency to reduce complex reality by seeing masterminds behind every bad thing. Trump has always played to that and now the Epstein scandal is rebounding on him.”
Meena Bose, of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University agreed, and added, “The president’s repeated discussion of multiple conspiracy theories, most recently about the 2016 election, has no parallel in American politics.”
The Times’ Baker suggested that the president has little chance of getting out from under the Epstein cloud that haunts him every day.
“The conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.,” he wrote before suggesting, “It was well known that Mr. Trump was friends with Mr. Epstein, although they later fell out. So it’s not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean,” and then adding, “The theories are endless.”
You can read his whole analysis here.