May the Beast You Rode in on Eat You Alive

On Trump, Epstein, and TV

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Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash

It’s something of an American pastime now, asking aloud if this is the Trump-Up that finally breaks his spell over his supporters. The answer each and every time has been a resounding “No,” eliciting an unspoken but palpable Aw, heck, from those of us dutifully praying on his downfall. Next time!

With the Trump-Epstein scandal, we find ourselves in yet another Next Time, though one that feels more than ever before like This Time (noting, with warranted skepticism, of course, that Next Time often feels this way). So, in observance of tradition, let us ask again: Is this one different? I think so. Here’s why.

I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch YouTube while I eat. Sometimes, I watch YouTube before bed. YouTube will guide you down some really strange rabbit holes if you let it, if you’re a more passive kind of viewer who clicks on the “related content” suggested at the end of every video, or one who simply lets YouTube decide what you’re watching next with autoplay.

This passive method of viewership has exposed me to many conspiracy theories, to uncaught serial killers with incredibly specific M.O.s (killers that, if captured, would solve some dozens of conspicuously interconnected murders), to political influencers with heterodox beliefs who preach to their followers while playing Fortnite, and to young makeup artists with technicolor faces whose value systems most closely resemble those of the early Pilgrims, to name a few.

How this hasn’t broken my brain yet, I don’t know. It’s possible that my brain is broken in a way I haven’t identified yet, but such is life in the Slopocene. What’s important here is that, seemingly overnight, this entire digital ecosystem shifted to Trump-Epstein content: A two-hour recap of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s long history of friendship. A body language expert weighing in on a video of Pam Bondi delivering official remarks on the status of the client list. A true crime YouTuber going over the missing minutes of footage from the “raw” Epstein prison footage released by the FBI. A YouTuber who specializes in the niche of interpersonal drama between other YouTubers uploading a video mocking the Trump Administration’s latest response—“They think we’re stupid!”

I could point to any number of interesting and related aspects: Many of these creators are by definition either apolitical or reactionary, as in, they’re internet ironists who think the Democrats are fatally cringe, are giddily bringing back slurs into common vernacular that haven’t enjoyed popular use since the early aughts, and believe Disney is ruining storytelling with DEI. Others are more true crime types, latching onto the macabre nature of Epstein’s crimes and the salacious, potential involvement of a sitting U.S. president. There’s a strong populist undercurrent to many of these videos pointing out that there’s a different set of rules for the wealthy and for the rest of us.

All worthy topics to look into. But, for me, it’s not so much an individual message, but a phenomenon in the collective that’s surprising to me. I genuinely haven’t seen Trump being talked about like this before, never seen him on the backfoot on his own turf: Entertainment. Social media. Conspiracy theories. TV.

Silly as it might sound, I do feel the need to say, as we toggle between real life and simulacra, that the facts surrounding the Epstein case are horrific. There are over 1,000 victims. The sexual abuse and trafficking are ghastly enough, but it’s the labyrinthine system of abetters, many of whom, like Prince Andrew, occupy the highest rungs of society, that invites both horror and speculation. Who else was involved? Does it go all the way to the top? Did Epstein have dirt on them? If so, where is it?

Given the sheer number of high-profile people involved, Epstein killing himself in his jail cell was an unsatisfying conclusion, and unsatisfying conclusions beget theories (the state of being unsatisfied by a story goes a long way in informing the why of a good deal of human activity). Trump, who thrives on dissatisfaction (“MAGA” being a call to repair an unsatisfying milieu), used this to his advantage. While Trump himself didn’t promise to release the Epstein files (he gave a limp “Yeah” when asked, then sorta reneged), Team Trump was eager to traffic in it. After Trump won the election, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed on Fox News that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” a quote that’s presently haunting her.

One might imagine that a man once touted as Epstein’s “best friend” would have to wrestle with that liability, but this hasn’t been the case with Trump, a master of projection who was all too happy to allow a good number of his followers to believe he was leading a crusade to expose a cabal of pedophiles in D.C. Best not to dwell on paradoxes such as these, lest your brain actually break. Narrative technology can resolve tension between real-world facts, and Trump and his base are immersed in a story where things happen according to the logic of capital-E Entertainment.

This, to me, is why Trump-Epstein feels different from previous scandals. It’s not fact-checkers, not a judge, not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, not Nancy Pelosi, not a “Resist Mom,” not a scholar or academic or activist “calling Trump out” or preaching about morality or appealing to our country’s better angels. It’s TV, that great beast he rode in on, turning on him. Today, with the content machine already close to overheating, the Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that Trump was among Epstein’s friends who wrote him bawdy letters for a 50th birthday album.

“The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album,” the story reads. “It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”

Trump, of course, threatened to sue WSJ in response, and vehemently denied the claims in the article. “I don’t draw pictures,” he said, though it was quickly revealed that not only does Trump draw pictures, but he used to regularly donate autographed drawings to the Doodle for Hunger Auction at Tavern on the Green (were the situation not so dark, this sounds like how a politician would get exposed on 30 Rock). Trump disclosed this himself in his book, Never Give Up. Trump does draw pictures. He draws them with a thick, dark marker, as he allegedly did in his birthday doodle to Epstein.

If all this weren’t enough, WSJ also included the text in the letter. “There must be more to life than having everything,” it begins with words from an omniscient narrator before becoming a conversation.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Some YouTubers and Redditors (two communities known to progenate the national vibes of tomorrow) have pointed out that “enigma” isn’t a word one would expect to find in Trump’s lexicon, and that it’s an anagram for gamine, a French word for a young girl. I’m typically not one for this kind of conjecture, but I do struggle to imagine Trump hearing and then deploying the word “enigma” without it being presented to him as some kind of perverted codeword, so who knows.

What I do know is that this letter is the shit that whips true crime YouTubers, conspiracy theorists, and their audiences into the sort of feeding frenzy typical of piranhas in old cartoons. It has everything. It is, in its very nature, cryptic, speaking in coy, impish little allusions. It continues to make me uncomfortable to recognize the bleak nature of Epstein’s doings and the circus erupting around it at the moment, but it must be said: This letter reads like it was carefully crafted to generate vigorous speculation.

Is any of this a smoking gun? No. But a smoking gun has never been a requirement for conspiracy theories. In fact, it’s the lack of a smoking gun, the lack of a satisfying narrative conclusion, that invites the speculation that transmutes into conspiracy. I’m not saying Trump writing this birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, or his friendship with Epstein, is a conspiracy. I’m saying it’s the stuff conspiracy feeds on, the stuff that QAnon and “they’re eating the pets” and birtherism feeds on. Only, this time, Trump isn’t tossing it scraps. He’s on the menu.

As certain Republican figures and supporters break precedent to condemn him (he was actually ratioed on his Truth Social post addressing calls to release the Epstein client list), it might be tempting (and naive) to think that it’s because, at last, a line has been crossed in the moral sand. Call me cynical, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s that Trump has conditioned his base to see the world through a conspiratorial lens, to see world events as part of one interconnected, all-encompassing narrative, but now finds himself cast in a role in that narrative he profoundly does not want to play. To this, one might tell him, “That’s showbiz.”

As a truly bewildering number of people are presently going down internet rabbit holes about Trump’s long history with the world’s most infamous pedophile, it’s worth pointing out that none of this is separable from TV. There are few observations left to make as to how Trump uses his experience in TV to drum up support. What we might do instead is imagine Trump not as “a product of TV,” but imagine that Trump sort of is TV. Or, rather, imagine TV working through him, its most perfect host and symbiont.

What TV wants is to perpetuate itself. A season of TV, for example, will contort its anatomy into all kinds of unnatural shapes to keep people’s attention on it. If it gets that attention, it will go on indefinitely (see: The Trump Administration, Season 2, bigger, badder, crazier than ever!).

This is why so many people have urged Americans to “stop paying attention” to certain things Trump does, or cautioned them “don’t fall for it” whenever he performs a stunt. “This is a distraction!” has been a clarion call of our age. Those shouting it from the rafters have rightly identified the source of Trump’s power, but their pleas have always felt impotent, as like a luddite throwing a fit outside of a Best Buy, because that’s not how anything works. We’re a country of watchers. Don’t touch that remote, we are very much watching this.

When I say TV, I don’t mean the thing mounted on your living room wall, but instead that TV-internet-social-media-entertainment creature that like a Portuguese Man of War is made up of smaller organisms, its many tendrils ferrying our attention up to one of its many mouths, a beast with no shortage of metonyms and is on this specific day, for example, known by the moniker Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate. Screens. I’m just going to trust here that you know what I mean.

Most of Trump’s “scandals” have seen him gain the upper hand by owning them. These victories wouldn’t be out of place at all in a poorly-written but ultimately crowd-pleasing show: See Trump getting arrested, then posting his mugshot to garner record-breaking cash in fundraising. QAnon is essentially a club of true crime enthusiasts, and one need not be full Q to experience the pleasures of watching the bad guys in the swamp losing to the good guys who, sure, don’t always play by the rules, but are fucking up a system that nobody likes anyway.

A good deal of Trump’s prior scandals have been him doing just that. Dishing it to people who “deserve it.” His cruel little nicknames. His big, showy executive orders. These are all things that titillate and entertain. What makes the Trump-Epstein stuff different from past Trump scandals is that Trump is actually asking you to stop paying attention to it. This is something television can’t do without drawing even more attention to it, or risking its own cancellation (in the TV sense of the word, though it functions both ways here).

His asking you to please stop paying attention to it, as he did in a press conference where he asked incredulously, “Are we still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” is having predictable consequences.

“‘Are we still talking about Jeffry Epstein?’ Hell yeah,” reads a top YouTube comment with 33,000 likes on a video about the WSJ article that garnered nearly two-million views in under ten hours. Numbers on the internet don’t mean anything, it’s worth remembering. Until they do. Until they do.

I’m not above any of this. I, too, am a content consumer, a person whose brain lights up when presented with a satisfying story beat, when narrative achieves poetry and metes out just desserts. I want to see Trump fall. I want to see him fall as a comeuppance. I don’t want to see banal accountability administered by a court. I don’t want to see him simply disgraced and allowed to putter about for the rest of his dim, dusty days in Mar-A-Lago. I want the kind of punishment that comes at the end of a not-particularly-nuanced movie. There should be a dunk tank, a clown nose, and a dunce cap involved.

My wanting that, my instinct toward it, justified as I believe it to be, is part of why I don’t think this country is on the precipice of a moral reckoning. I think it’s just itching for more content, and one thing we can rely on in modern America is more content. To that end, in its neverending cycle of auto-cannibalism, TV may well turn on Trump, devour him, and find a new channel, a new host. Or, it might not. Or, it might, but in a way that isn’t as satisfying as we’d hoped.

I suppose we’ll have to stay tuned.