Could Trump's Epstein cover-up help spark an anti-corruption movement?

When Republicans used the death of Jeffrey Epstein—in the custody of the Trump regime, which had one of the lawyers who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal serving as Secretary of Labor—to spark dark, impossible conspiracy theories implicating the Clintons, I often thought of the victims and survivors of Epstein’s conspiracy of abuse.

By focusing on them, reporter Julie K. Brown had done the reporting that finally brought the financier down. And their suffering was turned into a joke by Republicans who thought saying Epstein’s name was a way to implicate everyone on the left, rather than Trump, who at least let his old buddy die without facing any real justice.

And it didn’t matter to Republicans that it was a joke that made little literal sense. It appealed deeply to decades of fantasizing about Clinton for imaginary things, and his connection to Epstein, along with tingling whichever bone it is that’s stimulated when Trump screams about the “Deep State” as a way of trying to evade his numerous ties to Vladimir Putin and other nefarious creatures, like Jeffrey Epstein.

We now know there were more than 1,100 Epstein victims.

And that’s about all we learned from the Trump regime’s shoddy attempts to kill this story forever, after using it as a play toy in their mouths through the 2024 elections, as they carried out the massive con of presenting themselves as the oppressed underdogs aiming at undermining a system that was bleeding them dry by doing horrible things like feeding starving children, trying to end HIV in Africa, and researching cancer cures.

The video above is the latest installment of an ongoing conversation Marcy Wheeler and I are calling The Catturd Deficit. It’s about the anti-fascist disadvantage specifically when it comes to social media, which is just one aspect of Democrats’ messaging and branding problem, but often the most visible aspect and the one I think I know the most about.

In the video, Marcy explains why she’s been trolling MAGA about Epstein since January. And she digs into why this coverup seems to be blowing up a bit in Trump’s face, in many ways heightening the suspicion and contempt from what we’d call the Tucker Carlson corner of the GOP that’s against the bombing of Iran and hates to see Trump still coddling (((Epstein))).

We’ve learned from Bill O’Reilly that Trump is trying to “protect” people, or a specific person, in the Epstein files.

“If that name gets out,” O’Reilly said, “those people are destroyed, because there’s not going to be any context. Media doesn’t care about context, so, you can’t do that. You can’t destroy a human being by putting out the files, whatever they may be.”

The lives Trump is worried about definitely don’t belong to the 1,100 victims whose lives have already been traumatized, possibly forever. Nope, this is personal.

Which led to this scene.

This reminded me of when Trump put “birtherism” to bed right before the 2016 election. Not by offering any explanation or condolences. But by saying you move on, or I will growl at you. And it worked.

Could it work here?

Or is there something to the deep story, the massive mess of interlocking familiar frames, in this story that could push us to something much more meaningful?

In her latest newsletter and the accompanying episode of NEXT COMES WHAT, her podcast that I produce, Andrea Pitzer again pitches anti-corruption as a means of building a movement against Trumpism that could even trigger defections:

An anti-corruption campaign has universal appeal. Saying "Trump is deceiving you" or "MAGA is brainwashed" is unlikely to change anyone's mind. But "we are all, every one of us, getting cheated every day" is tremendously unifying to Democrats, to independents, to nonvoters, and Trump supporters alike.

Anticorruption has been a powerful force in politics at home and abroad in history, and I think it will continue to be useful. It may be the only way that some Trump supporters who feel too bound up with him will be able to walk away. An anti-corruption movement allows those potential voters to be swept up in a movement without making them the intensive and resource-draining singular focus of outreach.

The Jeffrey Epstein story is about corruption at the sickest levels.

And it points in two directions. There’s the barely veiled blood libel of QAnon, or there’s a far more wholesome rethinking of how power is used to spread pain and oppress the vulnerable in America, from the Supreme Court on down.

The latter is obviously what I’m thinking of. The latter is on the side of the victims.

But either way, this story bugs Trump. It divides MAGA slightly. And it raises dark questions about the Department of Justice—not for its massive corruption and weaponization, but for something. And getting any message through the shit flooding our country is something.

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