Why Trump’s pivot on the Epstein client list conspiracy is a big deal | Opinion

I will never forget the conversation I had with a white, conservative friend of mine in 2015 before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, climbed pre-election polls nationwide and easily won the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary on his path to the presidency.

My friend was already giddy about the possibility.

We had spent several years attending the same church together, a mostly white evangelical church in Conway. He began identifying as a Tea Partier not long after Barack Obama became president in 2009.

Though I didn’t agree, I understood why he gravitated towards the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, which fashioned itself as a kind of blue-collar outfit of the people that simply wanted to save this country. Many of the white members of our church felt the same. They were really Republicans trying to find a way to oppose the Democrat in the White House.

At that point, Trump was little more than a loud-talking New Yorker who had starred in a popular reality TV show. He was known for being unfaithful in his marriage — and seemingly proud of it — and a “billionaire” who had gone bankrupt multiple times. He was nothing like the people I had spent 17 years attending church with. And yet they were flocking to him anyway.

I told my friend that despite our racial differences, he and I had much more in common than he and Trump. He and I were Southerners through and through, and neither of our families had riches while Trump was a Northerner from a wealthy, influential family.

Yet Trump connected with many conservatives in South Carolina and beyond the more he talked about birtherism, the notion that President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in America.

Because of that, not a thing I said mattered to my friend. He went on to attend a Trump speech at Springmaid Beach Resort in Myrtle Beach and became a strong Trump supporter.

I’m remembering that exchange because of what’s happening within the Make America Great Again base of voters, made up of people like my old friend, whom I haven’t spoken to in years.

Trump and the people he appointed all but guaranteed that once he got back into office, he would make public a supposed Jeffrey Epstein “client list.” Top Democrats who allegedly had joined Epstein as he raped young girls would be handcuffed and given long prison sentences, their “deep state” would be dismantled, and Trump would be a great American hero.

There are millions of Trump supporters who believe God appointed him to save children from an alleged sex ring, the kind of thinking that motivated a North Carolina man to drive up to Washington, D.C., to rescue non-existent sex-slave children there.

Instead, the Trump administration announced there was no client list after all, that there will be no mass arrests of his political opponents.

Most of us consider Epstein to have been a sexual predator of the highest order but not the mastermind of a global child sex ring involving top Democrats. But the MAGA base sees a conspiracy theory and powerful people protecting themselves, and there’s nothing anyone — not even Trump — can say that will dissuade them of that belief. That’s why the president took to his social media outlet this weekend to strongly suggest his supporters move on from Epstein.

But they won’t. Because they truly believe in the conspiracy theory even if Trump and administration officials were lying about a child sex ring for political purposes. Some used it to grow their personal fan bases as commentators before joining the administration.

While the base has stayed loyal to Trump even as he took away health care from millions of them to provide tax breaks for the wealthy, this has the potential to uproot some of that loyalty. That could change the political environment quicker than any of us thought possible.

Trump did not rise to national political prominence because he had done great things for the working class. His rise began as he started spreading the bigoted conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t born in this country.

It would be political poetry if his spreading a different conspiracy theory was the cause of his downfall.

This story was originally published July 15, 2025 at 5:00 AM.