In one of the great unmade movies, Woody Allen directs a remake of Dracula with Jeffrey Epstein as the count. To celebrate the sex offender’s 63rd birthday in January 2016, Ghislaine Maxwell gathered tributes from friends. Allen’s contribution praised the food “well served” at dinners in Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“I say well served – often it’s by some professional houseman and just as often by several young women reminding one of Castle Dracula where [Bela] Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place. Add to this that Jeffrey lives in a vast house alone, one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”
One wonders what “service” Allen might have imagined for these young women and how those who were preyed upon could be construed in his screenplay as vampiric predators. But the image of Epstein as the undead ghoul was eerily prescient.
A nocturnal Count Jeffrey continues to hover at the window of Donald Trump’s White House bedroom. Last July, Trump himself picked up the metaphor of the undead, complaining bitterly of “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein”.
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Donald Trump made a fatal error when he invited the vampire Jeffrey Epstein in
Trump famously (and all too accurately) boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” But he can’t find a silver bullet for Epstein. This monster keeps rising from the damp earth of his dishonoured grave, threatening to sink his fangs into Trump’s presidency.
How come? No leader in any democracy has ever enjoyed Trump’s level of immunity from scandal. He is himself the guy who never dies. The Republican Party establishment was sure he was politically moribund when the Pussygate tapes emerged a month before the 2016 election. It was equally certain that Trump was finished after the Capitol invasion of January 6th, 2021.
None of it mattered in the end. It was thus reasonable to assume that a man who survived his own boasting about sexual assault and his attempt to overturn the result of a presidential election would survive anything. Trump has generated a force field that deflects all incoming disgrace and nothing, it seemed, could get through it. Except, it turns out, Epstein.
To make sense of this exception, we have to recognise that Trump made a very untypical mistake. The thing about Dracula is that he can’t force his way into your home. You have to invite him in. And this is what Trump did. He brought Epstein into his own world and made him, indeed, part of his protective force field.
In September 2022, Trump reposted on Truth Social an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin imprinted with the words “The Storm is Coming”. This was the signal many of his most fanatical followers had been waiting for. It showed not only that he was endorsing the QAnon conspiracy cult, but that he himself would be the saviour its true believers have been expecting.
QAnon is hard for rational people to get their heads around. As James Ball showed in his excellent book The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence, and subsequent publication of, a trove of emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton’s adviser John Podesta. These emails were disappointingly dull.
But, whether as a joke or a troll, some posters on the far-right 4chan forum suggested that what seemed to be mundane orders for food deliveries were sinister codes. “Hot dog” meant “boy”. “Pizza” meant “girl”. “Cheese” meant “little girl”, while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute”. The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a satanist paedophile ring operated by Clinton’s inner circle.
This verbal hoax was astonishingly successful. By 2020, fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media”, with 37 per cent unsure and 17 per cent in agreement.
A keystone of this cult is the belief that in the coming Storm, a great figure will take power and have his diabolical paedophile opponents tried and executed live on television. What Trump was doing in 2022 was confirming both that Q is true and that he is indeed that promised redeemer.
The problem with this, from Trump’s point of view, is not that it is stark staring nuts – the nuttier the better. It is that the Q fever-dream has an objective correlative, an all-too-real twin: the Epstein scandal. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “the real world provided a tantalising way into the madness of QAnon”. And vice versa: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s deluded believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man deeply embedded in America’s business, intellectual and political elites.
[ Epstein files: Trump taunted from beyond the graveOpens in new window ]
This intercourse between frenzied insanity and actual evil has as its offspring a chimerical creature, half dark fantasy and half even darker truth. And it is this monster that Trump invited into his political domain when he cynically exploited the Q cult.
He turned inward the force field of apocalyptic expectation that has hitherto shielded him from scandal. His return to office and release of the Epstein files was much more than a normal politician’s promise. It was an article of faith. To breach that faith is to morph from saviour to antichrist. What more satisfying climax to a conspiracy narrative can there be than the revelation that the apparent redeemer is actually the arch-conspirator?
Conspiracies, of course, never die. They are perpetual motion machines – every potential disproof is itself evidence that “They” are hiding the truth. Every word in every document is a clue, a code, a cipher. When you start by substituting girl for pizza and hot dog for boy, you can go on switching and swapping every meaning for some other meaning. Trump let the wrong one in and now, whatever he does, he is going to get it in the neck.
