Glenn Thrush:
Oh, they’re getting trashed over the past couple of days.
Look, Trump himself has been somewhat ambivalent about this whole issue. He was friendly with Jeffrey Epstein, shall we say. He appears in a whole bunch of photos and old videos hanging out with Epstein. I should say there’s no implication that he did anything nefarious.
But it’s always been kind of a weird fit for the Trump and MAGA movement to embrace the Epstein conspiracy because he himself seems to have had no problem being around Epstein for a long period of time. They had a falling out of a land deal, as a matter of fact, years ago.
But what this — the conspiracy theory is really important because it dovetails with the larger emotional, cultural, and political thrust of the whole MAGA movement, which is, there is a cabal in the establishment who is attempting to protect nefarious actors, powerful, shady, shadowy people, and Trump and the people that he appoints are going to come in and bust this all apart.
So, even if the particulars of the Epstein conspiracy are dissolving and the folks who once promoted it are attempting to distance themselves from it because they are now running the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the country, it still has a power.
And that power is the same thrust that put these people into these offices to begin with. And the thing I should tell you, Pam Bondi was the former attorney general of Florida. She has fairly basic qualifications for her job. But Kash Patel and his number two, Dan Bongino, are the least experienced people to occupy their current positions.
And the coin of their realm, the reason why they’re occupying those jobs is because they’re outsiders. So while the Epstein case itself may be receding into the background, the energy that it provided for these outsiders to become insiders is, I think, ultimately going to be the legacy.
