The internet, as we all know, is real life now, and nowhere more so than in the current White House, which spends remarkable heaps of time fine-tuning its political messaging for a particularly insane splinter of the turbo-online right. We got the most bizarre example yet of that phenomenon yesterday, when a group of MAGA influencers (after having met,
according to one attendee, President Donald Trump, Vide President JD Vance, National Security Advisor Mike Walz, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) came prancing out of the White House brandishing binders labeled “The Epstein Files.”
The financier Jeffrey Epstein’s shocking sex-trafficking charges, wide-ranging elite connections, and suspicious apparent suicide have long fueled online theories. In the most extreme, QAnon-adjacent version of these theories, the government is sitting on a trove of files linking hordes of elite political and media figures the world over to Epstein’s predations. Trump, never one to let anti-elite theorizing go to waste, had
promised on the campaign trail to get to the bottom of it.
Yesterday’s stunt, however, failed rather badly. If these files were so important, some MAGA types wondered, why had they been dispensed to a gaggle of goofy posters? When it became apparent that nothing in the important-looking binders was actually new—the contents had all been published online before—a circular firing squad sprung up at once. Why had Attorney General Pam Bondi not released the
good stuff, the
juicy stuff?
Well, said Bondi: It’s because the FBI is
still covering it up. In a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel that she immediately leaked to conservative media, Bondi said that a New York FBI office was still sitting on Epstein information, and demanded it be handed over at once. (Why Bondi didn’t get this out there
before the White House’s influencer-binder photo op, she didn’t explain.)
Do more files related to Esptein—perhaps containing actual new revelations—actually exist? Could be!
But it seems unlikely that they will live up to the wildest imaginings of the online cadre expecting to see some society-wide reckoning result from these revelations—which means there must always be some
truer, realer, deeper Epstein files just out of reach, on the tantalizing precipice of discovery.
