But on an even more serious level, his refusal to release the Epstein files may not merely be due to the likely appearance of his name in them but that they could evidence an allegation that has long circulated; that Donald Trump raped 13 year old Katie Johnson, later 16 year old Jane Doe, procured for him by Epstein and his partner in multiple sex crimes, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. How else can his good wishes towards her before her trial and hints that she could receive a Presidential pardon as she currently meets with Federal prosecutors be rationalised? His status as an adjudicated rapist and his predatory attitudes and behaviour towards adult women are matters of public record; testimony that he gets a thrill from barging into groups of under 16 females in states of undress meets the definition of paedophilia in the sexual attraction sense; should it be proved judicially that he raped Ms Johnston, then he should be properly regarded as a pederast or nonce in street parlance.
There are two main claims concerning the Epstein files: that Epstein kept a client list that he used to blackmail co-conspirators and that he did not commit suicide, but that he was murdered in his cell so that he would not reveal compromising material on his associates.[1]
For right-wing influencers and Trump acolytes, this was the opportunity to reveal the full moral turpitude of the Biden administration and the liberal, globalist elite. In the run up to last year’s US Presidential election, the wildly popular podcaster Dan Bongino fulminated:
On another right-wing podcast, Kash Patel, a Trump aide turned influencer, in 2023 urged Republicans in Congress to force the White House to reveal all. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority,” he said. “You can’t get the list? Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the paedophiles are.”
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said last October “We need to release the list.”[2]
Despite the presence of all three of these personages in office; Vance as Vice President; Patel as Director of the FBI and Bongino as his deputy, the Trump administration earlier this month issued a memo insisting that there is “no incriminating list” of clients, “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed anybody, and that Epstein definitely took his own life.[3] Trump had overruled Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s promise to release the files. He told his followers not to “waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”[4]
However, it is almost certain Trump’s erstwhile allies will not get this particular memo. For throughout the period following the revelation in January 2015 that Prince Andrew and other unnamed “powerful men” were referenced in a civil case against Epstein and the publication by Gawker of his little black book, febrile speculation solidifying into conspiracy theories has accompanied the various contours of the sordid saga around Epstein. Epstein’s defence attorney expressed “significant doubts” that his client had taken his own life; doubts that were shared by other public figures, including Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Guiliani and the Democratic representative Al Green.
There are two main claims concerning the Epstein files: that Epstein kept a client list that he used to blackmail co-conspirators and that he did not commit suicide, but that he was murdered in his cell so that he would not reveal compromising material on his associates.[1]
For right-wing influencers and Trump acolytes, this was the opportunity to reveal the full moral turpitude of the Biden administration and the liberal, globalist elite. In the run up to last year’s US Presidential election, the wildly popular podcaster Dan Bongino fulminated:
Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal because it speaks to an enormous problem in this country. It is that there is a connected class of insiders that feel that they can get away with anything because they can.
On another right-wing podcast, Kash Patel, a Trump aide turned influencer, in 2023 urged Republicans in Congress to force the White House to reveal all. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority,” he said. “You can’t get the list? Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the paedophiles are.”
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said last October “We need to release the list.”[2]
Despite the presence of all three of these personages in office; Vance as Vice President; Patel as Director of the FBI and Bongino as his deputy, the Trump administration earlier this month issued a memo insisting that there is “no incriminating list” of clients, “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed anybody, and that Epstein definitely took his own life.[3] Trump had overruled Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s promise to release the files. He told his followers not to “waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”[4]
However, it is almost certain Trump’s erstwhile allies will not get this particular memo. For throughout the period following the revelation in January 2015 that Prince Andrew and other unnamed “powerful men” were referenced in a civil case against Epstein and the publication by Gawker of his little black book, febrile speculation solidifying into conspiracy theories has accompanied the various contours of the sordid saga around Epstein. Epstein’s defence attorney expressed “significant doubts” that his client had taken his own life; doubts that were shared by other public figures, including Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Guiliani and the Democratic representative Al Green.
After Trump was voted out of office, conservatives trained their sights on the Democrats, baselessly accusing the Biden administration of supressing incriminating details related to Epstein, including the famed client list. Meanwhile, despite his friendship with Epstein in the 1990s, Trump was being showcased by the MAGA world as a fighter against the type of people who associated with the prolific sex offender. When the FBI searched Trump’s Florida residence in August 2022, the far-right commentator Jack Posobiec told his followers: “We now know the judge who signed off on the Mar-a-Lago raid was Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer. Don’t question it!” Fox News aired a doctored picture that falsely showed the judge next to Maxwell. But Trump himself was a reluctant crusader, suggesting on the campaign trail last year that he would declassify files about Epstein but cautioning that “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there.”[5]
Before looking in more detail as to how Trump has typically tried to ride out the storm over his connections to Epstein; whether this relationship will prove to be his downfall and the prospects of something developing even more to the right of Trump and the MAGA movement, it is very instructive to look at the component of the MAGA coalition which has provided the most red meat to its most devoted fantasists – the Q-Anon movement. For therein lies the greatest danger to Trump.
Q Anon: The Conspiracist Case Study
QAnon started in October 2017 when an anonymous user posted several times on the message board 4chan. That user called themselves ‘Q,’ suggesting that they had a level of US security approval referred to as ‘Q clearance. The 4chan posts were cryptic and coded; to be able to understand them would almost require the ability to learn a new language. They talked about Donald Trump a lot – as well as secret plans and pledges. But it’s USP and strapline was to be ‘Save the Children’ – the idea that powerful cabals of people were stealing, abducting, and even eating kids. [6] One figure stood out more than anyone else in this lurid and fantastic demonology – Hillary Clinton. She functioned as the archetypal Wicked Witch figure who led this cabal of liberal elites who drank the blood of “pure blood” children. During the 2016 Presidential Election, as the Democrat candidate, Ms Clinton became the lightning rod for so much right-wing populist hatred of the Washington and East Coast “elites” with the misogynist flavour that only successful liberal women like her can generate, that Trump rallies would always resound to the cries of “Lock Her Up”. It also generated the grotesque and unfounded Pizzagate conspiracy scandal in which she ran a paedophile ring of liberal politicians in the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which, never forget, led to a gun attack on the premises by a deranged individual sucked into that conspiracy narrative).
Accordingly, what really kicked the QAnon prophecy industry into gear was the expectation that when on 28 October 2017, news broke that the first indictments from the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump camp and Vladinimir Putin’s Russian mafia state to influence the outcome of the previous year’s election, the Trump fans on 4chan’s ‘/pol/ board (short for ‘politically incorrect’) were primed to believe that it would be a figure from the enemy side, namely Hillary Clinton, who would be arrested, not a more obvious figure from Trumpworld. This was the juncture of revelation; when the true nefarious plan would be uncovered, and the lamentations of the vanquished enemies would be great.[7]
The first ‘Qdrop’ fed this belief. ‘HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. ’ It read. ‘Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organised in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.' Although it didn’t make a major impact on its first landing, the poster in question was persistent – they kept the identity out there, continuing to drop tantalising hints of secret knowledge over the coming weeks.[8]
Of course, when it became apparent that Hillary Clinton’s forecast arrest on 30th October would not materialise (the arrestee being Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort instead) – one of many failed Q predictions. But for every failed prophecy there was an explanation – the plot, behind the scenes, was growing more complex and multi-dimensional. There would be new adversaries, and further revelations would prove the conspiracy ran even deeper than previously expected. In order to sustain the narrative, another element had to be bolted on.[9]
It is in this way that Q-Anon metastasised into a wider vortex of diverse but self-reinforcing conspiracies. For QAnon was a theory in search of a conspiracy. That Trump was fighting an evil plot was clear; what that plot actually was had considerably more flexibility. The New World Order merged with the Deep State to provide an overarching framework to understand the plots which swirled around in the minds of QAnon followers. New Age theories about alternative medicine accompanied white supremacist theories about the Great Replacement. As new events developed, they could be woven into the QAnon quilt with ease – Covid saw anti-vaccination and 5G theories worked into the fold; the 2020 Presidential election witnessed long-promulgated Republican theories about illegal voters combined with Bush-era Democrat beliefs about rigged voting machines.[10]
To those who have searched online for QAnon ‘map,’ and its world view requires navigation around baffling, hyperdense network diagrams of interlinked people, institutions, events, and belief systems – massive fractal images in which zeroing in on any node in the network reveals another conspiracy theory. Princess Diana sits along the North American Free Trade Agreement; the Trilateral Commission is just over ley lines; Black Lives Matter, fluoridation, cattle mutilation and the 1973 oil crisis as all part of the same masterplan.[11]
Perhaps expertise in numerology helps to decode QAnon messaging. According to the New York Times, when the Alabama State football top with the number 17 on and he held it up for the cameras, QAnon took it as a sign that he was on their side – because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Never mind that it was in 2017 and in 2015 they’d given Barack Obama a shirt with 15 on it.[12]
Stripping away all the attendant conspiracy theories, QAnon’s core belief is that Hollywood celebrities run the world harvesting life-extending chemicals from the blood of trafficked children, all of which is being secretly battled by Donald Trump and his sidekick, John F. Kennedy Junior who faked his own death in a plane crash in 1999 so that he could bide his time before joining “The Donald” in a global fight against international paedos.[13]
Stripped off the modern fantasticalism of faked deaths and crisis actors, QAnon is ultimately a reheated version of the age-old antisemitic trope that a group of evil Jews is plotting to take over the world; only now they’re called globalists, or bankers, or ‘Manhattan lawyers’ or ‘Hollywood elites’. But disturbingly, possibly the most irrational concatenation of beliefs that has emerged in the Western hemisphere since the era of the Third Reich, has acquired a solid base of constituents. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) The Persistence of QAnon in the post-Trump Era, based on a random sample of nearly 20,000 American people suggests that its peak, 17 per cent of them believed in QAnon. This report also shows that one in five Americans agreed with this base level QAnon statement: ‘There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.’ Regarding those who mainly view and trust far-right cable news channels like Newsmax and Fox News, a frightening 40 per cent of this cohort agreed with this declaration: “The government, media and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.’ [14]
The collision of and enmeshment of QAnon within wider far right conspiracist narratives around the ‘Deep State’ had real life consequences with the events of 6 January 2021 when weeks of ‘Stop the Steal' lying and agitation by Trump and his supporters about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election led to the storming of Capitol Hill by protestors determined to thwart the certification of Joe Biden as victor and incoming President. In the maelstrom of violence that day which led to the deaths of five people and the shocking visual imagery of makeshift gallows at which the mob intended to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence for his ‘treachery’ in doing his constitutional duty in verifying the election result and so ensuring the ordained, orderly transition of power, the figure of the QAnon Shaman – real name Jake Angeli – is arguably the most iconic symbol. One of several individuals present with known ties to QAnon, Angeli was memorably photographed in horns and a fur hat with the Stars and Stripes painted across his face. Evidence in the weeks and months ahead would substantiate the links between QAnon and assorted far right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.[15]
The Perils for Trump
It is the predominance of women among those who have swallowed the “Red Pill” in relation to QAnon that may spell most danger for Trump in light of his drawing back on the release of the Epstein files and the widely circulated images of his conviviality with the deceased sex offender in the 1990s. In her research into those ‘lost’ to QAnon and other conspiracist rabbit holes, Dr Sophia Moskalenko, a specialist at the University of Pennsylvania on the psychology of radicalisation, in mass psychology and in conspiracy theories, has found in her research that it’s the women who are more likely to be the ones in relationships to fall for QAnon. According to her, it often starts with ‘wellness’ websites devoted to seemingly fluffy and harmless New Age philosophies. The providers of yoga, kale, meditation, crystal and other seeming esoteric and ‘alternative’ health services are naturally suspicious of medical authorities and their promotion of man-made vaccines. As people discovered such realms of ‘hidden knowledge’ in the QAnon world; there is a natural urge to share with your groups this episteme which sets you apart. It was the notion that QAnon was out to rescue children from satanic paedophiles that appealed to so many. It became a rescue mission:
Before looking in more detail as to how Trump has typically tried to ride out the storm over his connections to Epstein; whether this relationship will prove to be his downfall and the prospects of something developing even more to the right of Trump and the MAGA movement, it is very instructive to look at the component of the MAGA coalition which has provided the most red meat to its most devoted fantasists – the Q-Anon movement. For therein lies the greatest danger to Trump.
Q Anon: The Conspiracist Case Study
QAnon started in October 2017 when an anonymous user posted several times on the message board 4chan. That user called themselves ‘Q,’ suggesting that they had a level of US security approval referred to as ‘Q clearance. The 4chan posts were cryptic and coded; to be able to understand them would almost require the ability to learn a new language. They talked about Donald Trump a lot – as well as secret plans and pledges. But it’s USP and strapline was to be ‘Save the Children’ – the idea that powerful cabals of people were stealing, abducting, and even eating kids. [6] One figure stood out more than anyone else in this lurid and fantastic demonology – Hillary Clinton. She functioned as the archetypal Wicked Witch figure who led this cabal of liberal elites who drank the blood of “pure blood” children. During the 2016 Presidential Election, as the Democrat candidate, Ms Clinton became the lightning rod for so much right-wing populist hatred of the Washington and East Coast “elites” with the misogynist flavour that only successful liberal women like her can generate, that Trump rallies would always resound to the cries of “Lock Her Up”. It also generated the grotesque and unfounded Pizzagate conspiracy scandal in which she ran a paedophile ring of liberal politicians in the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which, never forget, led to a gun attack on the premises by a deranged individual sucked into that conspiracy narrative).
Accordingly, what really kicked the QAnon prophecy industry into gear was the expectation that when on 28 October 2017, news broke that the first indictments from the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump camp and Vladinimir Putin’s Russian mafia state to influence the outcome of the previous year’s election, the Trump fans on 4chan’s ‘/pol/ board (short for ‘politically incorrect’) were primed to believe that it would be a figure from the enemy side, namely Hillary Clinton, who would be arrested, not a more obvious figure from Trumpworld. This was the juncture of revelation; when the true nefarious plan would be uncovered, and the lamentations of the vanquished enemies would be great.[7]
The first ‘Qdrop’ fed this belief. ‘HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. ’ It read. ‘Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organised in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.' Although it didn’t make a major impact on its first landing, the poster in question was persistent – they kept the identity out there, continuing to drop tantalising hints of secret knowledge over the coming weeks.[8]
Of course, when it became apparent that Hillary Clinton’s forecast arrest on 30th October would not materialise (the arrestee being Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort instead) – one of many failed Q predictions. But for every failed prophecy there was an explanation – the plot, behind the scenes, was growing more complex and multi-dimensional. There would be new adversaries, and further revelations would prove the conspiracy ran even deeper than previously expected. In order to sustain the narrative, another element had to be bolted on.[9]
It is in this way that Q-Anon metastasised into a wider vortex of diverse but self-reinforcing conspiracies. For QAnon was a theory in search of a conspiracy. That Trump was fighting an evil plot was clear; what that plot actually was had considerably more flexibility. The New World Order merged with the Deep State to provide an overarching framework to understand the plots which swirled around in the minds of QAnon followers. New Age theories about alternative medicine accompanied white supremacist theories about the Great Replacement. As new events developed, they could be woven into the QAnon quilt with ease – Covid saw anti-vaccination and 5G theories worked into the fold; the 2020 Presidential election witnessed long-promulgated Republican theories about illegal voters combined with Bush-era Democrat beliefs about rigged voting machines.[10]
To those who have searched online for QAnon ‘map,’ and its world view requires navigation around baffling, hyperdense network diagrams of interlinked people, institutions, events, and belief systems – massive fractal images in which zeroing in on any node in the network reveals another conspiracy theory. Princess Diana sits along the North American Free Trade Agreement; the Trilateral Commission is just over ley lines; Black Lives Matter, fluoridation, cattle mutilation and the 1973 oil crisis as all part of the same masterplan.[11]
Perhaps expertise in numerology helps to decode QAnon messaging. According to the New York Times, when the Alabama State football top with the number 17 on and he held it up for the cameras, QAnon took it as a sign that he was on their side – because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Never mind that it was in 2017 and in 2015 they’d given Barack Obama a shirt with 15 on it.[12]
Stripping away all the attendant conspiracy theories, QAnon’s core belief is that Hollywood celebrities run the world harvesting life-extending chemicals from the blood of trafficked children, all of which is being secretly battled by Donald Trump and his sidekick, John F. Kennedy Junior who faked his own death in a plane crash in 1999 so that he could bide his time before joining “The Donald” in a global fight against international paedos.[13]
Stripped off the modern fantasticalism of faked deaths and crisis actors, QAnon is ultimately a reheated version of the age-old antisemitic trope that a group of evil Jews is plotting to take over the world; only now they’re called globalists, or bankers, or ‘Manhattan lawyers’ or ‘Hollywood elites’. But disturbingly, possibly the most irrational concatenation of beliefs that has emerged in the Western hemisphere since the era of the Third Reich, has acquired a solid base of constituents. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) The Persistence of QAnon in the post-Trump Era, based on a random sample of nearly 20,000 American people suggests that its peak, 17 per cent of them believed in QAnon. This report also shows that one in five Americans agreed with this base level QAnon statement: ‘There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.’ Regarding those who mainly view and trust far-right cable news channels like Newsmax and Fox News, a frightening 40 per cent of this cohort agreed with this declaration: “The government, media and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.’ [14]
The collision of and enmeshment of QAnon within wider far right conspiracist narratives around the ‘Deep State’ had real life consequences with the events of 6 January 2021 when weeks of ‘Stop the Steal' lying and agitation by Trump and his supporters about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election led to the storming of Capitol Hill by protestors determined to thwart the certification of Joe Biden as victor and incoming President. In the maelstrom of violence that day which led to the deaths of five people and the shocking visual imagery of makeshift gallows at which the mob intended to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence for his ‘treachery’ in doing his constitutional duty in verifying the election result and so ensuring the ordained, orderly transition of power, the figure of the QAnon Shaman – real name Jake Angeli – is arguably the most iconic symbol. One of several individuals present with known ties to QAnon, Angeli was memorably photographed in horns and a fur hat with the Stars and Stripes painted across his face. Evidence in the weeks and months ahead would substantiate the links between QAnon and assorted far right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.[15]
The Perils for Trump
It is the predominance of women among those who have swallowed the “Red Pill” in relation to QAnon that may spell most danger for Trump in light of his drawing back on the release of the Epstein files and the widely circulated images of his conviviality with the deceased sex offender in the 1990s. In her research into those ‘lost’ to QAnon and other conspiracist rabbit holes, Dr Sophia Moskalenko, a specialist at the University of Pennsylvania on the psychology of radicalisation, in mass psychology and in conspiracy theories, has found in her research that it’s the women who are more likely to be the ones in relationships to fall for QAnon. According to her, it often starts with ‘wellness’ websites devoted to seemingly fluffy and harmless New Age philosophies. The providers of yoga, kale, meditation, crystal and other seeming esoteric and ‘alternative’ health services are naturally suspicious of medical authorities and their promotion of man-made vaccines. As people discovered such realms of ‘hidden knowledge’ in the QAnon world; there is a natural urge to share with your groups this episteme which sets you apart. It was the notion that QAnon was out to rescue children from satanic paedophiles that appealed to so many. It became a rescue mission:
that reverberated through a lot of online spaces frequented by women … by stay-at-home moms or the parenting-as-lifestyle people.[16]
The satanic, child trafficking cabal narrative fell on a fertile territory embellished by sex scandals in Hollywood, the #MeToo movement, sex scandals in the White House and the revelations of child abuse within churches on top of the preexisting cynicism towards government, elites, experts and the mainstream media.[17]
This type of female demographic which are traditionally open to the entreaties of conservative social movements such as pro-life or pro-family would now be (though not exclusively) be receptive to movements like “Liberty Moms” and far right politicians like Republican Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor- Greene a QAnon devotee and promoter of many other conspiracy theories.
Trump’s reaction to the furore around the non-release of the Epstein has been his tried and tested technique of distract, distract, distract. Just as on the same day during the 2016 campaign when the Access Hollywood tape emerged of Trump boasting about “grabbing women by the pussy”, his campaign team seized on the Wikileaks release of thousands of emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, helping him to snatch victory from what the jaws of what should have been a terminal moment, so Trump has put the distraction machine into overdrive, starting with a threat on 12th July to revoke the citizenship of the New York-born actor and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell for questioning his “moral compass”.[18]
Next came a Trump post on 16th July that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real cane sugar in its main product in the US. The next day came a rare missive from the White House Press Secretary on the President’s health, assuring reporters that his bruised hand resulting from “frequent handshaking” and his swollen legs caused by chronic venous insufficiency did not reflect any cause for concern.[19]
More darkly, he made the baseless claim that officials in the Obama administration had fabricated intelligence reports to assert that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, following that up with a fake-AI generated video, being forced to kneel by FBI agents, who handcuff him next to a beaming Trump in the Oval Office, then wearing an orange jumpsuit and pacing a prison cell to the soundtrack of the Village People’s YMCA. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, then attempted to give this despicable narrative further heft by making baseless claims that Obama and his “treasonous” advisers plotted nothing short of a coup.[20]
Trump has also resorted to another faux strongman weapon – lawfare. Last week, he sued the Wall Street Journal’s billionaire owner Rupert Murdoch, publisher Dow Jones and two of its reporters for libel and slander over claims he sent Jeffrey Epstein a signed lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman as part of a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003, according to reporting from the New York Times. The birthday gift collection includes about five dozen contributions from public figures and unknown acquaintances, according to documents reviewed by the Times and the Wall Street Journal and was assembled before Epstein’s first arrest.[21]
However, for all the lurid conspiracies which propelled to power – ‘birtherism’, the ‘American carnage’; the Podesta falsehoods; Pizzagate and the invasion of the US hordes of ‘bad hombres’ from ‘shithole countries’ like Haiti who eat the pets of the residents of Springfield, Ohio – he may well have to come to grief over the arguably the most preposterous of all of them – QAnon and its tale of the satanic cabal of blood drinking transnational elite paedophiles. While, admittedly, he was reluctant to openly peddle it, he was an undoubted beneficiary of it in his anointed role as saviour of American children. While the reaction of right-wing influencers to Trump’s apparent backsliding; for Alex Jones “over the top sickening”; Liz Wheeler “seems like unforgiveable behaviour” and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ description of Trump as “fat”, “a joke” and “stupid”[22], may, in the spectacle of rogues falling out, gave liberals and progressives temporary delight and relief, it is worth considering if this really is the hill that we would like Trump to die on. For the visceral feelings of betrayal felt by the QAnon and related parts of the Trump coalition at their hero’s involvement with the actually existing embodiment of internationalised child sex exploitation could lead to something even worse on the right – the emergence of a figure who, unlike Trump who merely but maliciously instrumentalises conspiracy theories, will sincerely believe and seek to execute the most deranged of them. A Republic of Gilead meets a 21st century Reich?
[1] Xavier Greenwood and Fred Harter, The Epstein files: Trump is trapped by the conspiracy theory he once gloried. The Observer 20th July 2025 pp.18-19
[2] Ibid, p.18
[3] Ibid
[4] Freddie Hayward American Affairs. Trump told his MAGA base to look the other way over Epstein. Now it’s looking at him. The New Statesman 25-31 July 2025
[5] The Observer, p.18
[6] Marianna Spring (2024) Among the Trolls. My Journey Through Conspiracyland. London: Atlantic Book pp.101-02
[7] Tom Phillips & Jonn Elledge (2022) Conspiracy. A History of Bxllocks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. London: Wildfire p.322
[8] Ibid, pp. 322-23
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid, p.325
[11] Ibid
[12] Danny Wallace (2024) Somebody Told Me. One Man’s Unexpected Journey down the Rabbit Hole of Lies Trolls and Conspiracies. London: Ebury Press p.86
[13] Ibid, p.85
[14] Ibid, p.85
[15] Springer, p.103
[16] Wallace, pp.94-95
[17] Ibid
[18] David Smith Nothing to see here! President’s Epstein files tactics miss the mark. Guardian 25th July 2025 pp28-29.
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Nina Lakhani and Lucy Campbell. New evidence of Trump-Epstein link fans flames as controversy grows. The Guardian. 24th July 2025 p.32
[22] The Observer, 20th July 2025 p.19
[3] Ibid
[4] Freddie Hayward American Affairs. Trump told his MAGA base to look the other way over Epstein. Now it’s looking at him. The New Statesman 25-31 July 2025
[5] The Observer, p.18
[6] Marianna Spring (2024) Among the Trolls. My Journey Through Conspiracyland. London: Atlantic Book pp.101-02
[7] Tom Phillips & Jonn Elledge (2022) Conspiracy. A History of Bxllocks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. London: Wildfire p.322
[8] Ibid, pp. 322-23
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid, p.325
[11] Ibid
[12] Danny Wallace (2024) Somebody Told Me. One Man’s Unexpected Journey down the Rabbit Hole of Lies Trolls and Conspiracies. London: Ebury Press p.86
[13] Ibid, p.85
[14] Ibid, p.85
[15] Springer, p.103
[16] Wallace, pp.94-95
[17] Ibid
[18] David Smith Nothing to see here! President’s Epstein files tactics miss the mark. Guardian 25th July 2025 pp28-29.
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Nina Lakhani and Lucy Campbell. New evidence of Trump-Epstein link fans flames as controversy grows. The Guardian. 24th July 2025 p.32
[22] The Observer, 20th July 2025 p.19
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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