There is a moment in every cult when the leader must tell the faithful that the prophecy was wrong. Not because it was false, but because it wasn’t important after all. We are there now with Trump and Epstein. For years, the Epstein “client list” has been the holy grail of American conspiracism: a rumoured document implicating elites, celebrities, politicians, and possibly Trump himself in a globe-spanning paedophile network protected by the British Royal Family, Santa Claus, the Clintons, CIA, MI6, and Mossad.
The MAGA base didn’t just believe in the list. They needed it. This was supposed to be the final blow. The arrests, the televised trials, the gallows at Gitmo. Proof that the swamp was real and that it could be drained by force. It was the moral justification for everything else: the travel bans, the border camps, the media hatred, the Capitol riot. Now, with the long-promised files dribbling out and Trump’s name dancing uneasily in the margins, what does he say?
“Nothing to see here.”
He called the whole thing “boring,” a “hoax,” a “Democrat distraction.” He told his base, the very people who spent years screaming Where’s the list? and Drain the swamp! to move on. Like he was a weary HR manager announcing budget cuts. This is the same man who once implied Hillary Clinton had people killed, who winked and nodded as QAnon spread across Facebook and YouTube like a rash. And now he expects the conspiracy-addled base to pretend the Epstein files never mattered.
But they do matter, to them, and to us. Not because they will bring down the elite (I hate that word, and they won’t), but because they expose the contradiction at the heart of Trumpism: you can’t simultaneously run the swamp and pretend to drain it.
“Drain the swamp? You built an extension on it.”
Here is the thing: there was never a “client list.”
Not officially. Not legally. Not even in the form people imagined. What existed were fragments: flight logs, contact books, visitor records, an old Rolodex. Names, yes. Proof, no. The files, now slowly released, contain names both well-known and obscure. Some dead, some long disassociated. Many had no confirmed criminal connection. The truth was greyer, duller, more banal than the myth could allow. Nothing close to a state-verified list of abusers or conspirators. The FBI didn’t compile one. The Democrats didn’t. The DOJ didn’t. It never surfaced in court, never leaked in some Watergate-style drop. It wasn’t buried. It simply didn’t exist.
The entire mythology in play at the moment, rests on a phrase dropped by Pam Bondi (Trump’s loyalist and media surrogate) who claimed that a “list” was “on her desk.” No further clarification. No documents. But in the fertile soil of conspiracy culture, that was enough. Suddenly there was a list. Influencers shouted it, shirts were printed, Telegram channels inflated with promises of imminent justice. But when the Department of Justice finally addressed the matter, they confirmed the obvious: no such list existed. No smoking gun. No sealed envelope. Just hype.
It’s easy to see why the line landed. The “list” offered moral clarity, villainy, even the promise of vengeance. But timing matters. Bondi’s phrase arrived just as Trump’s Justice Department was imploding. Seven top prosecutors had resigned rather than quash a corruption case against Eric Adams, and the newly launched “Weaponisation Working Group” looked less like reform and more like political payback. The Epstein myth was perfect cover: lurid enough to dominate feeds, hollow enough to control. While everyone chased ghosts on Telegram, the machinery of state was being quietly repurposed.
The base built a movement around a document that never was. And now, Trump, the man who helped mythologise it, says it was all a distraction. The silence is deafening.
“The base built a movement around a document that never was.”
Trump is now the state. He controls the levers, directs the prosecutions, and has packed his second administration with loyalists, cranks, and oligarchs. The very people he once gestured at with conspiratorial disgust (Wall Street predators, CIA operatives, arms dealers) are now his weekend dinner guests at Mar-a-Lago (think Camelot, but with golf and nonces). Of course he wants the Epstein story to go away. Not because it’s false, but because it’s messy, inconvenient, and implicates too many names on the donor roll.
Trump’s problem is his base is noticing. Dan Bongino is furious. Michael Flynn is fuming. Laura Loomer is clawing at the curtains. There’s a particular kind of rage that comes from realising your god won’t smite the wicked, not because he can’t, but because he is the wicked. This isn’t just ideological drift; it’s theological crisis. You can survive hypocrisy. You can even survive failure. But you can’t survive sacrilege. Telling the faithful that their prophecy was a sideshow is a kind of apostasy. The Messiah has betrayed the myth.
Yet the GOP, that dead-eyed corpse of a party, will not touch it. Speaker Mike Johnson cautiously muttered that transparency might be good. The House quietly blocked motions to compel disclosure. Behind closed doors, they’re begging Trump to shut up. But it’s too late. The damage is done.
Even Dugin, in his typically mad, esoteric way, sensed it. In his last post, he cast Trump not as saviour but as a figure caught between two collapsing myths. Order and apocalypse. For once, the Russian mystic wasn’t entirely wrong. Trump’s refusal to act on Epstein isn’t just a political misstep. It’s a revelation. He’s not going to burn the system down. He is the system now. The fantasy of reckoning has curdled. The base demanded fire. What they got was process. Silence. The dull hum of continuity.
“Tell your base that Epstein doesn’t matter, and they might start asking what else doesn’t.”
This isn’t to romanticise conspiracy culture. It is a symptom of political alienation, not a cure. But it had its uses, for Trump. It gave him plausible deniability, a sense of divine mission, and a ready-made enemy. Now that those tools no longer serve him, he discards them like last season’s slogan.
What we are seeing is the ideology of collapse, caught mid-transition: from righteous rebellion to cynical management. From war cry to press release. From “lock her up” to “let’s not dwell on the past.” Trumpism without conspiracy is just authoritarianism in a red tie. And the base, whether they know it yet or not, have been mugged by reality. Again.
But something will take its place. It always does. When belief collapses and the faithful are left holding nothing, they don’t walk away. They double down. Or they turn on the prophet.
So ask yourself: if Trump tells his people that there’s nothing to see in the Epstein files, and they still see something. Who is really in control?
