President Donald Trump wants people to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and sex trafficker who killed himself in 2019. Of course, the people who’ve been obsessively talking about Epstein for years are Trump’s conspiratorial MAGA supporters.
After years of Trump fanning the flames of Epstein conspiracies — including on the very day Epstein killed himself — the controlled burn has gotten out of control and threatens Trump and others in his administration as they’re accused of helping the “deep state” plot to cover up the “truth.” But beyond showing the dangers of conspiratorial politics, what we’re also seeing is the exposing of people who used conspiracies to cosplay as divinely ordained justice warriors against sex trafficking while actually putting a sexual predator back in the White House.
Jailed as a flight risk in 2019, Epstein died less than a month later from what investigations said was suicide by hanging. Shortly thereafter, viral memes, guests on Fox News, Republican members of Congress, and even Trump argued Epstein was murdered. Once injected into the socio-political bloodstream, the conspiracy never left. Now, even Trump can’t stop the chattering, so he’s resorted to attacking those on the right as allegedly helping Democrats by talking about Epstein.
“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump wrote on his social media platform yesterday (July 16). “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”
Conservative influencers hold up binders titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” that they received from the Trump administration at the White House on Feb. 27, 2025 — before the White House decided not to release a second part. (Ben Curtis/Associated Press)
As I attended or listened to MAGA events over the past few years, including those in churches, speakers often slid in the Epstein case along with election denialism, false COVID-19 claims, and other conspiracies. The crusading to burst open the Epstein files particularly helped Trump-backing preachers and political activists frame themselves as righteous justice warriors and cast Democrats as demonic pedophiles. But Trump now refuses to release information and is criticizing his own base for still talking about Epstein. So this issue of A Public Witness opens up the Epstein case to figure out who really killed him explore the dangers of phony, conspiratorial self-righteousness.
Birth of a Fixation
High-profile deaths often seem ripe for conspiracies, perhaps since it’s hard to have a more dramatic story than a secretive cabal who killed someone and got away with it (or someone who faked their death and is secretly watching us now). Thus, we’ve seen decades of conspiracies about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Princess Diana, and the murder of Tupac Shakur. But in recent years, QAnon and COVID-19 conspiracies turned pretty much any high-profile death into some larger story that needed to be uncovered.
“The new style of conspiracism that we see these days is often all-encompassing, trying to explain pretty much everything that’s wrong with this world with one simple explanation,” explained Yotam Ophir, a professor of communication at the University of Buffalo. “If you believe that there’s a cabal of nefarious people who are responsible for all that is wrong and bad in the world, why not believe that they are behind the deaths of your favorite celebrity.”
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