When a president tries to call a scandal a hoax while simultaneously using it as a ghost pepper to burn his enemies.
America has entered the kind of political funhouse where every mirror is cracked, every door leads back to the same hallway, and the tour guide keeps shouting that the haunted house isn’t real while throwing ceramic skeletons at people he doesn’t like. That, more or less, describes Donald Trump’s latest approach to the Epstein files, which he insists are a Democratic hoax even as he orders his own Justice Department to investigate Democrats within the very same files he says are fake.
The New York Times laid out the absurdity with the calm precision of a museum plaque describing a tornado. For months, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel dug through more than 100,000 Epstein related documents. Every email, every logbook, every scrap of metadata that had Washington vibrating like a beehive. They delivered their verdict this summer. No “client list.” No basis to investigate people who weren’t charged. Nothing to see here. Move on. Epstein fixation, they said, was a Democrat manufactured hoax meant to smear Trump by association.
Trump echoed the line. His supporters echoed the echo. Conservative media declared the matter dead, buried, and sealed under the political equivalent of concrete.
Then House Democrats released a new tranche of emails, and suddenly the afterlife began knocking on the lid.
The emails showed Epstein bragging that Trump “knew about the girls,” spent hours at his house, and knew the rhythm of things in a way that rankled Trump’s public mythologizing. Epstein wrote about tracking Trump’s travel and taking note of his proximity. Nothing explosive, nothing formally accusatory, but enough proximity to disrupt Trump’s preferred storyline that his only relationship to Epstein was a coincidental handshake in 1997 captured on a blurry photograph framed at every news desk in America.
The publication unleashed Trump’s most predictable instinct. Rage.
He raged in private to aides. He raged at the TV. He raged at the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which has now gathered more than 218 signatures in the House. He raged at the thought of losing narrative control at the very moment he has been trying to lead Republicans into an election year where the only villains allowed are immigrants, Democrats, and scientists with data.
At first, he responded with the familiar refrain. The Epstein file is a hoax. The emails are a hoax. The Democrats are trying to smear him with a hoax. But the more the signatures climbed, the more the leak coverage spread, the more his own proximity appeared in the narrative, the more he pivoted from denial to something far more dangerous.
He told Bondi to dig into Democratic names in the emails. He told Patel to coordinate intelligence reviews. He ordered Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, hand picked and loyal, to begin preliminary inquiries into Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, and any Democrat whose name popped up even adjacently.
The contradiction here is so sharp you could slice citrus with it. If the files are fake, there is nothing to investigate. If the files are real enough to weaponize selectively, then calling them a hoax is itself the hoax.
He wants the benefits of both realities. The deniability of fiction and the potency of fact.
The Times reporting shows him throwing elbows at anyone who disrupts his preferred universe. He pressured Republicans to vote against the release of the full Epstein files. Not because he believes in privacy or due process, but because the bipartisan transparency bill would reveal everything, not just the portions he wants highlighted with a spotlight and a fog machine.
If there is nothing incriminating in the files, releasing them would prove him right. If the files are a Democratic hoax, transparency would expose the fraud. If the emails are meaningless, sunlight would disinfect, not wound. But Trump’s refusal to support release is itself a message. He is not trying to clear the air. He is trying to control what oxygen gets into the room.
His strategy is an ouroboros eating itself. Bondi’s July memorandum declared the case closed. Now she is repurposed as chief inquisitor of a supposedly nonexistent scandal. Patel insisted the fixation was demonic political energy. Now he is stoking the fire. Clayton was appointed to restore credibility to the Southern District of New York. Now he is being asked to treat the biggest sex trafficking scandal of the century like a buffet where the only items allowed on the plate are Democrats.
The Times describes Trump fuming over the bipartisan bill as if it were a personal betrayal. He demanded Republican members reject it even before reading the text. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, refused to be intimidated. She called him out directly, accusing him of lying about her and trying to strong arm the caucus into shielding documents that could implicate him.
And that is when the recycling cycle of loyalists resumed.
Trump withdrew his endorsement of Greene. He called her “wacky,” a “ranting lunatic,” and a chronic complainer whose usefulness had expired. He did what he always does. The moment someone with access to his base deviates from the narrative he needs, they become disposable. Their histories erased. Their loyalty irrelevant. Their reputations thrown into the wood chipper that has been fed by generals, billionaires, governors, fixers, cabinet secretaries, and anyone else unlucky enough to hold power for long enough to develop a conscience.
He has done this for years. Mattis, the stoic Marine general who resigned over Syria, was recast as “the most overrated” officer in the world the moment he left. Mark Esper, who refused to deploy active duty troops onto American streets, became dead weight. Mark Milley, who chose the Constitution over political theater, was labeled treasonous in Trump’s second term, stripped of protections, and left as a warning to every subordinate about the cost of integrity. Rex Tillerson, who called Trump a moron, found himself publicly branded “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.” Nikki Haley and Chris Christie were turned into rhetorical chew toys the moment they criticized him.
H.R. McMaster lasted until he did not. Trump called him ineffective. Elon Musk was once a genius then suddenly a “bulls*** artist” who deserved deportation when he stopped performing as expected. John Bolton went from national security oracle to “wacko” and “sick puppy.” John Kelly, who spent 18 months trying to install adult supervision in a daycare full of gasoline, was dismissed as incompetent and temperamentally unfit. Anthony Scaramucci lasted eleven days before being declared unstable. Michael Cohen went from trusted fixer to “rat” and “liar” the moment he cooperated with prosecutors.
This is the pattern. Loyalty is never reciprocal. Proximity is never safe. If a person’s needs, conscience, or ambitions diverge even slightly from Trump’s, he flings them to the wolves and blames them for getting eaten.
Now Greene joins the list not because she turned moderate or supported higher taxes, but because she broke with him on the one battlefield he cannot afford to lose: the narrative architecture surrounding Epstein.
For Trump, the Epstein scandal is not a matter of justice or truth. It is a narrative threat. And narrative threats must be neutralized, not confronted.
He cannot say the files are legitimate, because they may reflect poorly on his decades of proximity to Epstein. He cannot say the files are illegitimate, because he wants to weaponize them selectively against Democrats. So he says both at the same time. The file is fake. And also the file contains real evidence of Democratic wrongdoing. The documents are meaningless. And also explosive. The scandal is made up. And also a national emergency.
This “two realities at once” strategy is not a bug. It is how he governs. Truth becomes elastic. Scandal becomes a mirror that only reflects in his direction when he needs it. Any portion of the file that implicates him, directly or by implication, is declared fraudulent. Any portion that mentions Democrats is immediately labeled “evidence.”
It is the same logic that drove his approach to the Mueller report: the final document was both a “total exoneration” and a “witch hunt” depending on the hour of the day. It is the same logic used during impeachment: the accusations were both “perfect phone calls” and “a coup.” And now with the Epstein documents, the playbook returns.
The most revealing detail in the Times reporting is not the rage or the phone calls or the pressure campaigns. It is the fear. Trump is afraid of seeing everything released. If this were truly a hoax, complete transparency would make his case. If Democrats were the only ones implicated, he would want every citizen glued to a livestream of the disclosures. Instead, he lobbies Republicans to block a bill with majority support, condemns even MAGA aligned defectors, and deploys Bondi not as a truth finder but as a barrier technician.
He wants a selective release, not a full one. A scalpel, not a floodlight.
The contradiction is so naked it does not require analysis, just eyesight. If the Epstein file contains nothing real, he would not be fighting disclosure. If it contains enough real material to justify investigations of Democrats, he cannot maintain that it is a hoax. And if it contains both, then the only logical conclusion is that Trump is not trying to expose anything. He is trying to bury the parts that matter to him.
The Fine Print of Projection
In the next few weeks, watch what happens as the Transparency Act moves through Congress. Watch how Trump’s allies, who spent years calling for the release of the “client list,” suddenly discover the joys of confidentiality. Watch how the language shifts from “release everything” to “protect victims,” even though victims are already protected under law. Watch how every mention of Trump’s proximity is dismissed as Democratic disinformation, while every mention of a Democrat becomes a lead story on the conservative circuit.
Most of all, watch the contradiction do its work in real time. If this is a hoax, there is nothing to investigate. If there is something to investigate, then the hoax claim collapses. And if the collapse threatens Trump, he will do what he always does: break the truth into pieces he can use and set fire to the rest.
That is the real scandal. Not the content of the files, but the man trying to play God with them.