The political world’s frenzy over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has essentially blotted out the sun. That’s even though Epstein has been dead for nearly six years, and the scandal around him has no apparent import to American public policy. So why is the obsession over it so intense?

The known facts around Epstein are genuinely mysterious and shocking. He became fabulously wealthy through unclear means, he cultivated a social circle full of powerful elites, he’s been accused of sex crimes by dozens of women (many of whom were underage), he owned two private islands, and he died in jail in what the FBI has said was a suicide.

But in the minds of many, the scandal has become something far more than the known facts — it’s become, basically, the mother of all conspiracy theories. Because a curious aspect to the Epstein scandal is that it has something to captivate just about every political subculture.

Depending on which parts of the story you zoom in on or studiously ignore, it can be a Me Too story of women being abused by a powerful man, a MAGA tale of liberal elites’ sex crimes, or a #Resistance scandal that will reveal the dark truth about Trump. Those inclined to suspect deep state malfeasance fixate on a cover-up or the hypothetical involvement of intelligence agencies. Antisemites focus on Epstein being Jewish.

Particularly, the MAGA right demonstrated extraordinary amounts of compartmentalization by becoming obsessed with Epstein while totally ignoring that the leader of their political movement, Trump, had well-documented ties to the man. The Epstein scandal would, they thought, reveal that Democrats were perverted sex criminals — and Trump would help expose the truth.

But any hopes of a revelatory new dump of Epstein info from the Trump administration have been extinguished, and Trump has desperately tried to change the subject to other topics. This may well be because Trump’s own name is in there. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that, back in May, administration officials told Trump his name appeared in Epstein case documents, alongside many other........

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