Protecting Pedophiles Proves Too Much

83% of Republicans Nationwide Want Epstein Files Released, Local Republicans Stay Mum

The Jeffrey Epstein files scandal is different from any other Trump scandal, because it’s a scandal most of all for his base. It’s a mutated continuation of the QAnon conspiracy, which began with the earliest “Q drops” in October 2017, falsely promising that Hillary Clinton’s arrest was already underway.

For true believers, whose hopes are being dashed, the Epstein files would finally expose the elite cabal of Satan-worshipping entertainers, top Democrats, and their globalist pals who control “the deep state” and traffic children to harvest a miracle chemical, adrenochrome, which only comes from human blood (a myth invented by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Adrenochrome is produced by the human body, but it’s no different from the commercial product available for decades). Steve Bannon called the files “the key that unlocks everything.”

But Trump isn’t just blocking the files’ release — even though Bloomberg reports his name has already been redacted. He’s also playing footsie with Epstein’s chief enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell, whose “Mary Poppins” persona enabled her to recruit a constant stream of innocent victims for him to rape. They appear to be concocting a whole new cover story intended to sideline any serious investigation. Maxwell’s already been relocated to a minimum-security “club fed” (in violation of regulations barring sex offenders) as an apparent reward for whatever she said in two days of conversation with Trump’s private defense attorney and current #2 official at the Department of Justice, Todd Blanche.

This seems to portend the rolling out of a whole new cover-up narrative in the near future. But so far, the more Trump tries to evade releasing material, the worse it gets. His claim that Democrats had doctored the files to implicate him, for example, has been met with disbelief. On the r/conservative subreddit, user AngryGambl3r wrote:

That just seems so… convenient.

They put his name in, and then do absolutely nothing with it?

That just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want the Dems in power in the slightest, but this just isn’t believable.

The pattern was clear, user Cylerhusk added:

Every time he opens his mouth about the Epstein files, it’s just getting more and more embarrassing at this point.

So embarrassing that local Trump/Republican supporters don’t even want to talk about it. Random Lengths reached out to more than a dozen such supporters we’ve heard from in recent years, and none would comment in any detail. Only two people responded at all.

“I feel that Trump is doing a fantastic job as President. I support all of his decisions,” said South Bay real estate agent John Altamura. “Too bad the Democratic Main Stream Media is totally controlled by the Liberals, and they cannot give Trump any credit. They are a disgrace to objective Journalism.”

At least RPV attorney John Resich was willing to say something about Epstein, if not much.

“What about Epstein? He was in jail and died. Clinton was his best friend,” Resich said — effortlessly swapping Trump out for former President Bill Clinton. “All you reporters want is to bring up trash. The judge keeps the grand jury transcripts. Nothing Trump or anyone in the administration can do is release those transcripts without a judge allowing it, so look at the judges who are doing this  Rag on them,” Resich said.

But no one’s asking for the grand jury testimony — except for Trump, as a distraction. What they’re asking for is the vast trove of files gathered in the FBI investigation — the files Trump previously promised to release.

Polls by both CBS and the Washington Post found that 83% percent of Republicans think the administration should release all the information it has. But numbers alone can’t convey the significance of the apparent cover-up.

A Line In the Sand

“This one’s a line in the sand … we thought Trump was going to come in and a lot of things are going to be resolved,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast. “And when you have this one hardcore line in the sand that everybody [has] been talking about forever and then they’re trying to gaslight you on that,” he said before shaking his head.

In the past Trump has minimized his close, well-known, more than decade-long friendship with Epstein and told two contradictory stories of their falling out: Either because of a real estate bidding war (or sneak attack according to Epstein), or because — out of the blue — Trump belatedly discovered Epstein was ‘a creep’ sometime around 2004, even though Epstein remained a Mar-a-Lago member through 2007, when he was initially investigated for sex trafficking. But now Trump’s telling a completely different tale: that Epstein “stole” his employees — not once, but twice — as if they were his private property, things, not people.

“That’s not true,” said journalist Tara Palmeri, who investigated Epstein for nearly two years for her podcast, Broken: Jeffrey Epstein.

“They remained friends during that time,” Palmeri said on MSNBC’s Deadline Whitehouse. Trump said that Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an outspoken Epstein victim who died by suicide in April, was one of the people Epstein stole. She was procured by Ghislaine Maxwell, Palmeri said. “And Virginia told me she met Donald Trump through Jeffrey Epstein.” She was only with Epstein from 2000 to 2002, years before Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership ended. So Trump’s new story has more holes than Swiss cheese.

Giuffre’s family was visibly upset by Trump’s latest claim in an NBC interview. “I think we were shocked by it — especially the use of the term ‘stolen.’ Because she’s not an object. She’s a person. She’s a mom. She’s a sister,” her brother Sky Roberts said tearfully. “And she was recruited by Maxwell. She wasn’t stolen, she was recruited at Mar-a-Lago — his property … It just kind of makes us wonder … how much he knew … A couple of years later, he made a statement on Epstein and how he liked young girls.”

But it’s not just a new and disturbing account, Palmeri noted. It contradicted Trump’s own sworn testimony. “Donald Trump was deposed by one of the victims, the lawyers for the victims, Brian Edwards,” she said. “And when he told the story it was over real estate, it was over a piece of property, Palm Beach waterfront property, they got in a bidding war, and because of it Trump had to pay more, he ended [up] hav[ing] to pay $40 million for a property ironically called ‘the house of friendship.’”

Worse than that, Trump biographer Michael Wolff now tells Epstein’s side of the story on the MeidasTouch podcast, adding to his reporting in Siege: Trump Under Fire. In this telling, Epstein was buying the property from a bankruptcy court for $36 million, and showed it to Trump, seeking his advice on relocating the swimming pool, only to have Trump surreptitiously enter a last-minute $41 million bid “entirely financed by Deutsche Bank.” 

When Trump resold it two years later for a $55 million profit, it was “a red flag of money laundering” (likely involving the Russian mob), further infuriating Epstein, who threatened to go to the press, “saying that Trump was a front man for a money-laundering deal.” And that’s when he believes Trump tipped off prosecutors to go after him as a pre-emptive strike against his own possible investigation.

While both Epstein’s and Trump’s dealings are shrouded in mystery, there’s ample evidence that Epstein was deeply involved with Israeli intelligence, while Trump’s real estate dealings involved Russian mobsters and later oligarchs, who were assets, if not agents of Soviet and then Russian intelligence. Both men spent decades swimming in disinformation that obscured their corruption, along with the motives of the intelligence agencies they collaborated with. In the world they moved in, everyone treated young girls like objects. It was second nature to them. 

Naturally, Giuffre’s family was sharply critical of the recent Trump administration outreach to Maxwell, after she and her lawyer met with Todd Blanche — Trump’s #2 at the Department of Justice, and his former defense lawyer — to discuss what she knew about the case, and likely help start developing a new cover-up narrative.

“If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer. A woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position,” Giuffre’s family said in a written statement. “The government and the President should never consider giving Ghislaine Maxwell any leniency.”

Days later, leniency was exactly what Maxwell got: a transfer to a minimum security facility, which is off-limits for a sex offender, thus requiring a special waiver. It’s also unheard of for a prisoner in the early years of a 20-year sentence.

Normally, Trump lying, rewriting the past, and tossing out one fanciful distraction after another would more than satisfy his base. But the Epstein case is different. Not only does it matter for his QAnon-influenced conspiracist base, but for a significant chunk of new supporters who helped him narrowly win the election last November, typified by Rogan and like-minded podcasters’ followers. They’ve been vocally quite upset, as the topic has taken off, despite Trump’s repeated calls for people to stop talking about it.

“Epstein has been discussed by prominent right-wing podcasters in more than 3,000 episodes across nearly 125 podcasts this year,” the Wall Street Journal reported on July 31. “Those conversations grew more than eightfold in the last three weeks despite Trump’s admonishment that MAGA drop the issue.”

QAnon Origins To Epstein Now

From October 2017 on, QAnon conspiracists elaborated a fantasy of Trump secretly battling the evil cabal of child predators, who would all be swept from power and arrested in “the Storm,” a cataclysmic day of reckoning. The QAnon movement grew vibrantly before the Jan. 6 insurrection, and played a significant role in contributing to it, as Random Lengths reported at the time (Aftermath of A Coup: The Threat Lives On Feb. 4, 2021). As a result, leading social media platforms increased efforts to ban QAnon content, but by then, there was a whole ecosystem of QAnon influencers who migrated to less moderated platforms, like Telegram and Rumble.

With Trump no longer in the White House, and “Q” himself falling silent, the movement became more diffuse, splintering into various influencer networks. But the conspiratorial mindset and certain core beliefs became normalized in the Republican Party, as the authors of two books on QAnon explained in 2024.

“QAnon as a movement based around secret codes and clues and riddles doesn’t so much exist anymore,” Mike Rothschild, the author of The Storm is Upon Us, told NPR in late December.”But it doesn’t need to exist anymore because its tenets have become such a major part of mainstream conservatism and such a big part of the base of people that reelected Donald Trump.”

Will Sommer, author of the book Trust the Plan, said something similar to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump in April. “QAnon and these conspiratorial beliefs and a lot of the ideas that were at the core of it … that has become more mainstreamed in the Republican Party,” Sommer told Bump. “It’s not that the Republican Party rejected QAnon, but that QAnon sort of assimilated into the GOP.”

Indeed, Trump amplified QAnon content on Truth Social nearly 1,000 times between joining the site in 2022 and the final weeks of his reelection campaign in 2024, according to a Media Matters analysis published on Oct. 29. This was a much higher rate than he had previously promoted QAnon on Twitter prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to earlier Media Matters monitoring.

What’s more, a Public Religion Research Institute  poll just before the election found that 32% of Republicans who favored Donald Trump qualified as QAnon believers based on agreement with three statements:

(1) Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country, (2) There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders, and (3) The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

In addition, eight in 10 QAnon believers registered to vote said they intended to vote for Trump. Tying #2 and #3 together, the Epstein files have emerged as “the key that unlocks everything,” in Banon’s words. Which is why the Epstein files scandal matters more than others that outrage the broader public as a whole.

“Epstein’s old news,” Resich said. But it’s Trump’s own base that’s not just kept the story alive, but seen it as a key reason for their support. “This one’s a line in the sand,” as Rogan said. 

For the broader public, Trump has already lost significant support on his key winning issues — immigration and the economy — as his actions and results don’t match his promises. His tariffs and Gestapo-like immigration raids are visible signs of how much he’s out of step with the country he pretends to represent. Gallup has his approval at an abysmal 37%, and he’s so worried about losing the House in 2026 that he’s pushed Texas Republicans to pass an outrageous mid-decade gerrymander to give them five more seats, while depriving Black and Hispanic voters of any realistic opportunity for representation. California may respond with a gerrymander of its own. 

While there are many issues out there that divide Americans — and Trump is always on the lookout for another one — opposing pedophilia isn’t one of them. Which is why it could ultimately prove to be Trump’s downfall.