The Atlantic – no paywall: “Donald Trump helped create a monster. Now he’d like for everyone to ignore it. After years of sounding dog whistles and peddling outright conspiracism to work his supporters into a lather about global pedophile rings, Trump is telling those same people to move on. Earlier today, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy—a pillar of the MAGA cinematic universe—is a “hoax” and went so far as to disavow his “PAST supporters” over the issue. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work,” he wrote. “I don’t want their support anymore!” The responses poured in immediately on the platform. It is not going well for Trump. “Why was Epstein in prison then? How about Ghislaine?  For a hoax? I don’t think so,” a top reply to the post reads. “This is the hill we all die on.” In short, Trump appears to have lost control of the situation. In a second term that’s been defined by chaos, unpopular policies, and the dismantling of the federal government, Trump has managed to bounce back from one scandal after another.  Except, perhaps, from this one. If there’s one person who can derail a Trump presidency, it appears that it might be a convicted sex offender who has been dead nearly six years. The Jeffrey Epstein saga is just about perfect, as conspiracy theories go. At its core, it’s about a cabal of corrupt billionaires, politicians, and celebrities exploiting children on a distant island—catnip for online influencers and QAnon types who have bought into any number of outlandish stories. Yet for such a dark conspiracy theory, there’s a great deal we know about Epstein’s life and crimes. There are unsealed court transcripts, flight records, victim statements. His black book has been reported on, giving the public access to names of people Epstein is thought to have associated with (though some have said they don’t know why he had their information). There’s real investigative reporting, much of it from the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, who spoke with detectives and victims and provided a fuller account of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and the attempts to downplay his crimes. Brown also credits the police officers who continued to press on their own investigation as federal officials seemed to wave it away. The case is real and horrifying, which gives life to all the wild speculation: If this is true, why not that? At the center is a genuine secret, the main thing that keeps the story from fading away: the specter of Epstein’s so-called client list, a document that supposedly contains the names of powerful people whom Epstein provided girls to. This list is the basis for the most sordid and compelling parts of the conspiracy theory: that Epstein not only facilitated the trafficking of these girls to elites, but that he then entrapped and extorted those elites. The Trump administration had teased the release of this list as though it were a blockbuster movie, even though its very existence remains an open question: Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” But in an abrupt reversal last week, the Department of Justice and the FBI released a memo saying that the list would not be coming after all and that the list did not even exist, an announcement that has enraged many prominent members of the MAGA base and captured the interest of, well, everyone else…

Now the people around Trump—many of them current or former MAGA news personalities and influencers who had previously leveraged Epstein’s death as a piece of political propaganda—have been forced to make an awkward choice between pursuing a story they’ve touted for years as a massive government cover-up or siding with Trump. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign from his post over the administration’s handling of the situation; Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday that the DOJ should release more information; and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (a proud conspiracy theorist) appears livid. But the establishment is starting to fall into place: House Republicans voted unanimously yesterday to block the release of additional Epstein files. Influencers who once tweeted that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” are now tripping over themselves to reverse course. They are audience-captured in two directions—pleasing Trump would mean displeasing their audiences, and vice versa—leaving them to make an awkward choice.