Fintan O'Toole on Trump's Epstein Problem
| This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.
Today in the NYR Online, Fintan O’Toole writes about Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein problem. While the president courted an American style of conspiracy theorizing to rise to power, those conspiracies have also, O’Toole points out, kept Epstein in the news, alongside the very real offenses that both men committed against vulnerable people: Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.
Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are five articles from our archive about American conspiracies, real or imagined. For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. “The affinity between a purity-obsessed physical culture and right-wing traditionalism would be less politically significant were it not for America’s long-standing belief in the transformational power of the mind.” —May 29, 2025 “The Birchers drew on many of the same sorts of sentiments we now see among the Trumpers. Businessmen seeking lower taxes and deregulation were able to enlist the support of those who felt that the America they had grown up in was being destroyed.” —June 23, 2022 “Sadism, as it is depicted by Sade, is also, and perhaps primarily, the creation of a world in which the powerful and wealthy are able to lure the poor and powerless, hold them captive, and reduce their bodies and selfhoods to nothing.” —February 12, 2020 From time to time, a scandal emerges that gives us a glimpse of this deeply interconnected, secretive realm of power wielded by the ultra-rich. The Miami Herald’s recent investigation of Jeffrey Epstein by Julie K. Brown revealed the existence of a company he was involved in named Carbyne. Ostensibly, Carbyne supplies tools for use by emergency services, such as geolocation devices and equipment for live video feeds, but much of this material doubles very effectively as surveillance technologies. The company was founded by the former Israeli general and politician Ehud Barak; its investors and board members are a who’s who of the private security world, and include Peter Thiel and his Palantir co-founder, Trae Stephens, Pinchas Buchris, Michael Chertoff, and, of course, Erik Prince.
—August 27, 2019 “Conspiracy theories work on a different level than mere lies. They lodge themselves in the mind by showing that something could be true without proving that it is true. They are therefore impossible to disprove: they cannot be fact-checked because their central tenets are conjectures rather than facts. Debates spawned by conspiracy theories become fruitless arguments about beliefs, and merely by having them, we gradually elevate these theories from assertion to assumption.” —November 2, 2016 Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
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