Trump can't put the Epstein genie back in the bottle he helped open

CONSPIRACY THEORIES, particularly those that involve and seem to implicate the rich and powerful, are hard maybe impossible to contain.

- By Timothy L. O'Brien

They're predicated on the assumption that elites are orchestrating cover-ups to manipulate the great unwashed or to mask wrongdoing. No amount of disclosure fully stems the suspicions that fuel conspiracy theories because those theories, by their very nature, assume that ruses are designed to be perpetual. The truth may never be known. Something will always be hidden. The man is out to get you.

So we've had generations of speculation and conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination and Area 51. So we now have the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy.

There are enough uncomfortable or unsettled aspects of this trio of examples to give them conspiratorial lift. It didn’t make sense that Jack Ruby got that close to Lee Harvey Oswald or that Oswald managed to shoot Kennedy all by himself. If there were no aliens or UFOs at Area 51, why was the military conducting expensive UFO studies, and what explained the odd goings-on in Nevada? How did it come to pass that Epstein was found hanging in his Manhattan jail cell in 2019, and what about the “secret list” of powerful enablers who may have helped the sexual predator and trafficker roam freely for so long?

President Donald Trump is a veteran shapeshifter who has deployed conspiracy theories with so much enthusiasm and for so long that he might as well swap his red MAGA cap for a tinfoil hat. Yet insulating himself and his political prospects from his relationship with Epstein and the fallout arising from federal investigations of the disgraced financier has become an acute and intractable problem. He finds himself on the downward, slippery slope of a conspiracy theory he helped set in motion with no obvious barriers emerging to break his fall.

It has always been thus when scandal and Washington intersect, but this moment is vividly wacky, thoroughly Trumpy, quite ungovernable, and oozing with karma.