There were a couple of ways to think about the Trump administration’s about-face on releasing the files on America’s most notorious sex criminal, Jeffrey Epstein.

The most obvious explanation was that the members of President Trump’s administration had been aping him in his method of political warfare: exaggerating the connections between Epstein and America’s business and political elite and those elites’ involvement with procuring and trafficking underage girls.

This is the cynical answer, which is oftentimes a good one when talking about politicians. And if that’s what happened, then the scandal would be that Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and others lied about the case and then failed to develop an effective exit strategy for their scheme, wrongly believing that they could manage the disappointment of their supporters when the jig was up.

That wouldn’t have been a crazy miscalculation to make. Trump has pulled off exactly that maneuver many times, whether it was implicating a television host in the death of a congressional intern, that Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) father was part of the plot to kill President John F. Kennedy, or that former President Obama was actually born in Kenya.

As Trump said of the Cruz smear, “Of course I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t believe it, but I did say ‘let people read it.’”

That’s the let-bygones-be-bygones approach. Trump explains this as being a “counterpucher.” It’s not that truth is the first casualty, it is that truth is immaterial. It’s just the games people play, easily forgiven by supporters who don’t mind some rough justice for political foes.

Then there are those untruths that Trump never abandons, most famously his claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.........

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