Team Trump Happily Seizes the Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy Story, Hands Dems Another Loss, World Completely Not Shocked

Any troll worth their salt would have advised Trump to retweet Terrence K. Williams’ conspiracy idea.

If anyone didn’t see this one coming — Trump’s bullshit-farmers picking up the Jeffrey Epstein suicide conspiracy theory to use as a handy Negan bat against “the Clinton cabal” before the usual parasocial-attention-addicted Twitter suspects had a chance to chime in with anything more than a collective faux-apathetic-but-cautiously-authoritative “Hmmm” — I have $2.5 million I need to wire you if you’ll just send me your banking info.

Of course, for Trump’s part, it was “just a retweet,” the usual implicit defense when he’s pulling something completely nuts. It’s his WWE-style finishing move, fronting the same “Hey, I might have butt-retweeted it, who knows” excuse that’s kept the corporate liberal media looking like the Banana Splits for three years now. But, as usual, it worked to energize trolls (see main graphic; 4chan doesn’t archive posts), who are always looking for an angle. So now, instead of jacking the volume on the mildly agitated hmm-ing of their tweets, celebri-pundit liberals get to spend their Twitter time the old-fashioned way: racking up likes by redundantly expressing outrage, defending a position that was theirs for the taking if they’d simply planted the flag.

Okay, fine, with only a few hours elapsing between Epstein’s death and Trump’s retweet, MSNBC didn’t have any time to turn Epstein’s non-suspicious suicide (would you have wanted his future life?) into one of their patented, half-committal “breaking news” items. No, that would have required horse-whipping a roomful of Ramen-gobbling interns to put away Instagram until they came up with the name of some Trump crony who might have done the deed. After drawing the shortest straw, Ari Melber would have gotten the ball rolling, to wit: “So, a close, long-time acquaintance of Roger Stone was in Manhattan (!) the evening of Epstein’s shocking suicide. Raises some questions in the view of some folks — what about you, Malcolm Nance and Carrot Top?”

But, as usual, the liberal media were compelled to hold up on any loonspeak, and now it’s too late. Little matter though. If they’d been preparing to go on the attack, they’d have been instructed to chum out their version of Epsteingate in dribs and drabs until moderate-lefty Twitter was ready to come to a consensus that would only play on Twitter, and meanwhile, roll the Lexus and pharma ads.

Team Trump and their Meme Team didn’t waste any time, stealing the Epsteingate ball and dunking it, no-look-backwards, over lefty media’s head. Of course, the fact is, they had to. Shit was getting awful thick, what with the video of Trump and Epstein deciding on blondes during the 1992 “calendar girl” party at Mar-a-Lago. So, within a few hours, the perfect tweet was chosen (“Where are my blacks!”) and it was done. Behold, the next Seth Rich bullshit story.

It’s just how the Republicans roll, which everybody should know by now. An Epsteingate accusation against Clinton — and later on, by extension, whoever ends up winning the Democratic nomination — is going to have wings as long as the Republicans need it to fly. My over/under for a comment from the ever-chuckling QAnon is two weeks.

As a veteran troll who was in the thick of it when even the weakest racist comment could get you chased off the internet, to paraphrase Ash from the film Alien, I admire the purity of Republican propagandists, if not their anti-worker aims. I’ve always thought of pro-Republican misinformation as a form of political aikido, in which they use their opponents’ own momentum against them. “I’m ‘racist’, you say? How racist of you to say that!”

Granted, the tactic is only slightly more sophisticated than Pee Wee Herman nasaling “I know you are but what am I,” but it works every time. One would expect Republican voters to feel insulted by obvious troll campaigns like Pizzagate and all that stuff, but they’re not. They Want To Believe. And that’s the difference between hardscrabble working-class Trumpies who watch Fox and comfortably middle-class Hillary/Biden supporters who consider themselves “woke” and progressive without ever having watched an Abby Martin video. They don’t Want To Believe anything, they just wonder why so many people don’t seem to believe the things they do. Hmm.

Make no mistake, Epsteingate is merely an opening salvo in the coming troll wars of 2020. It’s going to get a hundred times worse, especially if a moderate Democrat gets the 2020 nod. I’ll be discussing that, as well as the technical and economic reasons why political trolling will remain a problem for 2020 and beyond, how the intelligence agencies failed the country in 2016, how social media-centric faux-radical feminism is eventually going to split the Democratic base, and other such things in future pieces. If you’re impatient, you could always buy my book.