The Jeffrey Epstein hysteria is a menace to democracy

Donald Trump did not suck off Bill Clinton, okay? Thankfully this has now been clarified for us by the respectable press. Trump ‘did not perform sex act on Bill Clinton’, says a headline at the Daily Telegraph. The ‘confusion’ has now been ‘cleared up’, says the New Republic – Trump did not have sexual relations with that man, to paraphrase an old Clinton line. What a time to be alive, when the press feels compelled to reassure the public that the 47th president of the United States did not get down on his knees and fellate the 42nd.

This tall tale of a blow job sprung from the vast stash of Jeffrey Epstein emails released by House Democrats last Wednesday. The tragic, sun-starved sleuths of the Epstein scandal clocked that one email seemed to be about Trump giving head. It was written by Jeffrey’s brother, Mark, in March 2018. He tells Jeffrey he should ask Steve Bannon, Trump’s then chief strategist, if Vladimir Putin has ‘the photos of Trump blowing Bubba’. Cue instant hysteria online, first because Trump apparently ‘blew’ someone, and secondly because it was ‘Bubba’. And we all know who that is, right? One William Jefferson Clinton.

It went wildly viral. ‘An email in the Jeffrey Epstein files that references President Donald Trump “blowing Bubba” has attracted scrutiny on social media’, said Newsweek. That’s putting it mildly. The wholly dystopic vision of Trump and Clinton getting it on was gleefully gabbed about by armies of TDS-suffering leftists and hard-right MAGA-heads who are turning on Trump because he doesn’t hate Jews. The mainstream media treated it seriously, too. People magazine informed readers that it had ‘reached out [to] Clinton’s office for comment’ but ‘did not receive an immediate response’. The mind boggles at what they asked him. ‘Dear Sir, did Trump do a Lewinsky on you?’

It turns out – brace yourselves – that it never happened. So febrile was the chatter online that Mark Epstein felt moved to issue a clarification. ‘Bubba’ is not a reference to Bill Clinton, he said. What’s more, that whole email chain was just a ‘humorous private exchange between two brothers’. But if he thought cold facts were going to put out the fires of speculation, he was mistaken. Mark Epstein has only removed ‘a modicum of the mystery’ around the rumoured BJ, said the New Republic. His statement still ‘leaves the true identity of Bubba unknown’. Jesus wept – they’re never going to stop, are they?

Perusing the digital shitstorm over the Trump-Clinton sex story (some of it jokey, some of it deadly serious), it struck me that the Epstein affair is the new Russiagate. First because both have asserted, in the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, that the Ruskies are in possession of compromising footage of Trump being a big old pervert. Who can forget that insane ‘dossier’, treated seriously by everyone from Buzzfeed (RIP) to CNN, which said the Kremlin had video of Trump watching two prostitutes take a leak? Now there are people on the internet, and even in the real world, wondering if the Kremlin has photos of Trump having gay sex. Either Trump is very bad at keeping his sexual antics private or these people are completely nuts. I think I know which it is.

The second, more important way that the Epstein lunacy feels like a sequel to Russiagate is because this scandal, too, is being shamelessly weaponised by Trump’s critics and haters. Just as the wild claims about Trump being in bed with Putin were cited as proof that he’s an ‘illegitimate president’ – to quote Hillary Clinton – so the rumour-mongering about his relationship with Epstein is being used to cast him as a uniquely twisted individual, unfit for high office. In both cases, scandal-mongering becomes a stand-in for real politics. Unable to beat Trump on the fair and open field of democratic contestation, his opponents try to dethrone him with wicked whispers about his private life. Fearing they haven’t got a leg to stand on in the battle of ideas, they wield the dagger of suspicion instead. It is an entirely anti-democratic exercise.

No sooner had the Dems of the House Oversight Committee released thousands of Epstein’s emails than digital freaks and churnalists were poring over them for proof of Trump’s wickedness. They latched on to an email from Epstein that described Trump as ‘the dog that didn’t bark’. And another claiming that one of the alleged victims of Epstein’s trafficking horrors had ‘spent hours at my house’ with Trump. Epstein also offered a reporter ‘photos of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen’. Anti-Trump commentators are in no doubt – the Epstein scandal will be his downfall. The Epstein affair is now a ‘chronic disease of the Trump presidency’, says a writer for the New Yorker, with more than a hint of glee. Apparently the Epstein affair is ‘Trump’s kryptonite’ – an apt description of how his haters hope this magic scandal might weaken to the point of death this administration they hate.

You don’t have to be a Trump apologist to spy the rank opportunism at play here. No one of good conscience denies that Epstein was a very bad man – a convicted sex offender who exploited vulnerable young women for his own grim gratification. And few will deny that Trump, a celebrity billionaire for years, will likely have moved in dodgy circles. But the transformation of Epstein from a wicked individual into a folk devil, an all-purpose symbol of the rot afflicting the ruling class, is something else entirely. It has a medieval feel to it. It is built on the conspiratorial belief that Epstein’s little black book was packed with politicians and celebrities, proving that we the masses are ruled over by a vast network of evil paedos. This fevered, fact-lite narrative has gone too far. It is a menace to reason and to democracy.

The Epstein scandal has become a demented substitute for public life. The Dems have been frantically pushing the Trump-Epstein link for a couple of years now, hoping hearsay might do what their manifesto failed to – bring down Trump. One-time MAGA nutters like Marjorie Taylor Greene are exploiting it, too, to register their dissatisfaction with Trump. And Trump himself is not above marshalling the ghost of this dead paedo to do the dirty work of politics – he has now changed his mind on releasing the Epstein files and says we need to investigate the Dems’ links with Epstein.

Scandal-mongering really is the lowest form of politics. It’s court politics, better suited to the era of princes and priests than to the democratic age. Rumour-spreading and finger-pointing were the chief weapons of the feudal era – discussion and persuasion ought to be the principles of the modern era. The Epstein scandal turns politics into skullduggery and reduces the American public to mere spectators of the crumbling of their ruling class under the weight of accusation and counter-accusation. It’s time to put this conspiracy theory to rest.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.