Bombing the Narrative: Trump, Distraction, and the Attempt to Erase the Epstein Files
On Christmas Day 2025, Donald Trump posted two messages on Truth Social that, read together, feel less like coincidence and more like choreography.
In the first, Trump announced that the United States had launched airstrikes against Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria. He described a “powerful and deadly strike” against “ISIS Terrorist Scum,” claimed the group had been “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians,” and warned there would be “many more” dead if the “slaughter of Christians continues.” He also referred to the Pentagon as the “Department of War,” praised “numerous perfect strikes,” and ended with the grotesque fusion of holiday greeting and death wish: “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists.” (Reuters: 2025; The Guardian: 2025).
Hours later, he posted a second Christmas message, this time aimed at Jeffrey Epstein and the people Trump alleges once “loved” him, funded him, visited his island, attended his parties, then “drop[ped] him like a dog” when the heat arrived. Trump framed the Epstein story not as a criminal scandal with victims, documents, and long-standing public record, but as a political weapon wielded against him: a “Radical Left Witch Hunt,” an extension of the familiar Trump cosmology where all scrutiny is hoax, all institutions are corrupt, and all accountability is partisan theatre. (Newsweek: 2025; New York Post: 2025).
If you wanted a case study in distraction politics —how a presidency attempts to seize the public’s attention with spectacle, moral panic, and patriotic violence just as an inconvenient narrative refuses to die — you could scarcely design a cleaner example.
Whatever Trump wants his supporters to believe, Epstein’s story is not new, and it is not confined to the partisan imagination. Trump’s social relationship with Epstein has been documented for years; mainstream reporting has tracked the overlap between elite social worlds, the protection networks that surround wealth, and the ways in which power can turn criminality into background noise. (Plague Island: 2025). And, crucially, fresh reporting and document releases have continued to generate headlines that Trump can’t simply wish away by shouting “hoax,” including coverage of newly released Epstein-related emails and claims about Trump’s proximity to Epstein’s orbit.
Trump’s Christmas-night Epstein post reads like a man trying to slam a door that will not stay shut.
His language does not engage evidence; it attacks perception and polarises. The aim is not to ‘win’ a factual dispute but to make factual dispute impossible by transforming the very idea of proof into a tribal signal. “Witch hunt” is not a claim you can verify. It is a spell you cast. Its purpose is to tell the audience: if you hear anything bad about Trump, you already know what it is: enemy action.
The argument of this piece is straightforward: on Christmas Day 2025, Trump attempted to bury the Epstein narrative under the emotional weight of patriotic violence and Christian persecution rhetoric. The military strike becomes a tool not only of foreign policy, but of domestic narrative management, a televised morality play that invites his base to feel righteous rather than look closely. But the attempt is revealing precisely because it is so naked. The harder Trump tries to frame Epstein as a partisan hoax, the more it suggests he understands what is at stake: that in an environment where enough people refuse to look, documents don’t matter; photographs don’t matter; testimony doesn’t matter; the victims are simply swallowed by noise.
The question is whether that noise still works.
In the age of constant scandal, distraction is usually the easiest form of power. But desperation has a smell of its own. And these posts, twin dispatches from a Christmas presidency, reek of it.
The Nigeria Post as Mythmaking: Sanctified Violence and the Politics of Christian Grievance
The Nigeria post is written like a sermon. From its opening line, “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief,” Trump positions himself as head of government and the singular source of action and judgment. There is no sense of institutional process, alliance coordination, or strategic constraint. Power flows downward from one man, and that power is framed as righteous, personal, and absolute. This is a familiar Trumpian move, but here it is intensified by the language that follows.
The enemy is not described in neutral or operational terms. They are “ISIS Terrorist Scum.” The strike is not precise or limited; it is “powerful and deadly.” The outcome is not deterrence or degradation of capacity, but death, celebrated openly. “There was hell to pay, and tonight, there was.” The vocabulary is punitive, moralistic, and explicitly retributive. This matters because Trump does not frame the violence primarily as counterterrorism. He frames it as defence of Christians.
The phrase “primarily, innocent Christians” is doing enormous political work. It collapses a complex Nigerian security crisis into a single religious axis and recasts the United States as the armed protector of a persecuted faith community. This is a mythic simplification designed for domestic consumption. Nigerian authorities and international observers have repeatedly stressed that jihadist violence in Nigeria targets both Christians and Muslims, and that much of the killing is driven by insurgency, criminal banditry, and state fragility rather than a single coherent religious campaign (Reuters: 2025; The Guardian: 2025). Trump ignores that complexity entirely, which is part of the strategy.
By foregrounding Christianity, Trump activates a long-standing narrative within the MAGA movement: that Christians, especially conservative Christians, are under siege, ignored by liberal elites, and in need of a strongman protector. In this worldview, violence becomes not only justified but holy. The strike is framed as moral correction, a punishment inflicted by a leader willing to do what others will not.
The reference to the Pentagon as the “Department of War” is also revealing. The term is archaic and symbolic. It evokes an older, less constrained vision of American power, one unburdened by international law, human rights discourse, or post–Cold War caution. War, in this framing, is an expression of virtue.
This is reinforced by Trump’s boast that the strikes were “perfect,” and that “only the United States is capable of doing” such things. The language is exceptionalist to the point of fantasy. Precision becomes proof of moral superiority. Violence becomes evidence of righteousness.
And then comes the line that crystallises the entire post: “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists.”
This is the fusion of religious celebration with death, offered without irony or restraint. Christmas, a holiday associated with peace and humility, is repurposed as a backdrop for killing. The dead are folded into the greeting as a punchline. The implication is unmistakable: their deaths are not just acceptable; they are positively festive.
This is sanctified violence which is laundered through religious identity and holiday symbolism. And it is aimed squarely at Trump’s base. For a particular segment of the American right, this language does not sound grotesque. It sounds reassuring. It affirms a worldview in which Christianity is embattled, Muslims are suspect, and American power is a divine instrument. Trump is feeding believers. He is telling them: I am your shield. I am your avenger. I will strike your enemies, and I will do it without apology, even on Christmas Day.
That timing is critical. Christmas is an emotional amplifier. Issuing this message on Christmas Day allows Trump to bypass deliberation and go straight to identity. Questioning the strike becomes emotionally adjacent to questioning the defence of Christians themselves. Doubt is reframed as disloyalty to the faith.
This is why the Nigeria post cannot be read in isolation. Its function is not primarily foreign policy. It is narrative engineering. It creates an atmosphere of moral clarity and righteous violence that makes what follows — Trump’s furious intervention in the Epstein narrative — easier to absorb without scrutiny.
A base that feels protected does not ask difficult questions. A base that feels it is fighting a holy battle is primed to forgive, to dismiss evidence, to treat any accusation against its champion as persecution. Trump understands this instinctively. He has relied on it for nearly a decade.
But there is something brittle about the performance here. The need to emphasise perfection, uniqueness, and divine alignment suggests anxiety rather than confidence. Leaders secure in their legitimacy rarely need to wrap violence in so much symbolism. The myth is being worked hard because the reality is less cooperative.
And that tension, the gap between the myth Trump is constructing and the pressure he is trying to escape, becomes even clearer when we turn to the second post. Because the language Trump uses to sanctify violence abroad is mirrored almost exactly in the language he uses to portray himself as persecuted at home.
In both cases, complexity is erased and enemies are moralised rather than analysed. The goal is the same: to replace evidence with emotion, and scrutiny with loyalty. That is the terrain on which the Epstein Files now sit.
Persecution as Political Technology: How Trump Rewrites Epstein
If the Nigeria post constructs Trump as righteous avenger, the Epstein post constructs him as persecuted martyr. The two roles are mutually reinforcing. Together, they form the emotional architecture of Trumpism: absolute power outward, absolute victimhood inward.
Trump’s Christmas Day Epstein message reads like a panic response. He does not engage the substance of what has re-emerged into public view: the persistence of Epstein-related documentation; the continued release of emails, flight logs, and depositions; the fact that Epstein’s network was never fully exposed or dismantled; the reality that elite protection, not transparency, has defined the aftermath of Epstein’s death. Instead, Trump reaches immediately for a familiar script. Everything is a “Witch Hunt.” Everything is “FAKE.” Everyone is corrupt, malicious, or deranged.
The language is strikingly repetitive. Trump cycles through the same catalogue of enemies: “Radical Left,” “sleazebags,” “lowlife Republicans,” without distinction. Precision is not the point. The aim is saturation. By the end of the post, responsibility has dissolved into a haze of omnidirectional hostility. Nothing sticks because everything is blamed.
This is how persecution rhetoric works when deployed as political technology. It does not persuade undecided readers; it stabilises loyal ones. It tells Trump’s base exactly how to interpret what they are seeing before they see it. If Epstein resurfaces, you already know why. If documents appear, you already know what they are. If testimony circulates, you already know it is tainted.
Crucially, Trump frames Epstein not as a criminal who preyed on minors, but as a social liability who was “dropped like a dog” when he became inconvenient. This is a revealing inversion. The victims vanish from the story entirely. Epstein himself becomes secondary. What remains is Trump’s grievance: that people who once existed in his social orbit later distanced themselves, and that this distancing is now being weaponised against him.
This reframing does important work. By recasting Epstein as a political football rather than a sexual predator, Trump shifts the moral centre of the story away from harm and toward loyalty. The real crime, in this version of events, is not abuse; it is betrayal. The real injustice is not what Epstein did; it is what Trump claims is being done to him.
That inversion mirrors the logic of authoritarian self-defence everywhere. Power does not deny wrongdoing directly. It denies relevance. It insists that what matters is not what happened, but who benefits from talking about it.
Trump reinforces this by explicitly linking Epstein to previous “hoaxes”: Russia, impeachment, January 6 investigations. Each reference functions as a rhetorical solvent. The point is not whether these events were comparable or connected. The point is to flatten them into a single, undifferentiated experience of persecution. Once everything becomes ‘the same thing,’ nothing needs to be examined on its own terms.
This is how evidence is neutralised without being disproved. The accusation of “hoax” does not require factual coherence. It requires emotional resonance. It allows Trump’s supporters to feel sophisticated; worldly enough to know that ‘they’ are always lying, while avoiding the discomfort of moral reckoning. It is a permission structure: permission not to look, not to ask, not to care.
What makes the Epstein post particularly revealing is its tone. There is none of the casual bravado that marked Trump’s earlier dismissals of scandal. Instead, the message feels crowded, breathless, almost compulsive. He is trying to smother the story away. The sheer density of grievance suggests that Trump understands something important: that the Epstein Files are not a single news cycle, but a recurring wound.
Trump’s self-presentation as persecuted is also carefully calibrated to resonate with his religious base. The language of witch hunts, enemies, and false accusations echoes biblical tropes of unjust suffering. The implication is subtle but powerful: Trump is not merely under political attack; he is being tested. Those who stand by him prove their faith. Those who question him reveal their weakness.
This is why the Nigeria post and the Epstein post belong together. The first tells Trump’s supporters who he is when he acts: strong, decisive, holy. The second tells them who he is when he is questioned: besieged, misunderstood, unfairly targeted. In both cases, Trump occupies the moral centre of the universe. Violence abroad and grievance at home become two expressions of the same identity.
Most importantly, this strategy only works if enough people accept that truth itself is partisan. Trump does not need to convince his base that Epstein was innocent or that no evidence exists. He only needs to convince them that no evidence about him can be trusted. Once that epistemic collapse is achieved, photographs are just images, documents are just paper, and testimony is just noise.
But this is where the desperation begins to show. The more Trump insists that Epstein is ‘just another hoax,’ the more he signals that the story has not been contained. The louder the denunciation, the clearer the fear beneath it. Power that is secure does not need to shout innocence. It does not need to work this hard to keep its followers from looking sideways.
Persecution rhetoric has always been Trump’s shield. What is new is how visibly he now needs it. And that visibility, the frantic repetition, the absence of denial in favour of deflection, the total erasure of victims from the narrative suggests that something has shifted. The Epstein Files refuse to stay buried. They resurface not because of partisan obsession, but because they point to a deeper, unresolved truth about how power protects itself.
Which is why the next move matters so much. When persecution rhetoric alone is no longer enough, spectacle becomes necessary. And when spectacle alone is not enough, distraction escalates. It is the logic of survival.
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Distraction as Doctrine: Flooding the Zone to Collapse Attention
Trump’s Christmas Day posts only make full sense when read through the logic of distraction, which is not new to Trumpism. From the beginning of his political career, Trump has relied on spectacle to dominate the information environment: provocative tweets timed to derail damaging coverage; culture-war flare-ups deployed whenever scrutiny tightens; foreign policy theatrics used to project decisiveness at moments of domestic vulnerability. What is different now is not the method, but the intensity.
The Nigeria strike announcement is structurally complementary to the Epstein post. Where the Epstein narrative threatens to narrow attention, to focus the public gaze on documents, timelines, associations, and responsibility, the Nigeria post explodes attention outward. Instead of names, dates, and victims, the audience is offered enemies, heroes, and righteous violence. This is distraction as substitution: one story does not simply crowd out another; it reconditions how stories are processed at all.
This is what Steve Bannon once called “flooding the zone with shit,” not in the crude sense of producing noise for its own sake, but in the more sophisticated sense of overwhelming the audience’s capacity to distinguish signal from spectacle. When everything is loud, nothing is clear. When everything is urgent, nothing can be examined properly.
The Nigeria post exemplifies this strategy perfectly. It is emotionally maximalist, morally absolutist, and narratively simple. There are villains (terrorists), innocents (Christians), and a decisive saviour (Trump). There is no ambiguity. In that sense, it functions as an attention reset. Whatever questions were forming about Epstein are abruptly displaced by a more emotionally gratifying story, one that allows Trump’s supporters to feel strong, righteous, and aligned with power rather than uneasy, conflicted, or morally implicated.
This is crucial, because Epstein represents a different kind of threat to Trumpism. He is not a policy failure or an electoral setback. He is a reminder that Trump is not an outsider smashing a corrupt system, but a product of elite social worlds that shield predation and reward silence. Epstein collapses the populist fantasy. He reveals proximity, not persecution.
That is why distraction becomes existential rather than tactical. In moments like this, Trump wants to change the emotional weather. He needs his base to feel embattled and triumphant at the same time: besieged by enemies yet reassured that their leader is still capable of spectacular force. The Nigeria strike supplies that reassurance. It says: whatever they are accusing me of, look what I am doing. Look how powerful I remain.
This is the authoritarian grammar of distraction. External violence is used to reaffirm internal authority. Foreign enemies are elevated to crowd out domestic accountability. War — real or rhetorically exaggerated — becomes proof of leadership.
Importantly, Trump does not frame the Nigeria action as part of a long, grinding counterterrorism effort. He frames it as an event: dramatic, decisive, complete. “Numerous perfect strikes.” “There was hell to pay.” The implication is finality. Closure. Nothing more needs to be discussed.
That sense of closure is psychologically seductive. It contrasts sharply with the Epstein story, which is unresolved, morally disturbing, and structurally incomplete. Epstein does not offer catharsis. He offers questions. And questions are dangerous to regimes that survive on loyalty rather than scrutiny.
Distraction, then, is not simply about avoiding blame. It is about preserving a worldview in which power is always virtuous and doubt is always hostile. By encouraging his supporters to emotionally invest in the Nigeria narrative, Trump reduces the cognitive space available for discomfort elsewhere. Attention is finite. Moral outrage can only be directed in so many directions at once.
This is also why Trump’s distraction tactics increasingly rely on moral polarisation rather than novelty. Early in his career, Trump could derail coverage with a shocking insult or an outrageous claim. Today, the distractions must be heavier, more symbolic, more charged. They must touch identity, faith, and existential threat. Nigeria-as-Christian-persecution fits that requirement precisely.
Yet here, too, the strategy shows strain. Distraction works best when it feels effortless. When it is overused, it begins to look like what it is: evasion. The simultaneity of the posts, the rush to dominate Christmas Day with multiple, overlapping spectacles, suggests urgency. Trump is no longer casually steering the conversation. He is trying to wrestle it back.
That wrestling exposes a vulnerability. Distraction depends on an audience willing to follow. It requires trust, not in institutions, but in the leader’s narrative authority. The more often Trump demands that his supporters look there instead of here, the more obvious the gesture becomes. Over time, even loyal audiences begin to notice the pattern.
This is the paradox at the heart of Trump’s predicament. The very techniques that once insulated him from accountability are now revealing how much he fears it. The louder the spectacle, the more it advertises the threat it is meant to conceal.
The Nigeria strike is a stress response. It is what distraction looks like when it has become doctrine, when the system no longer knows how to survive without constant emotional mobilisation. That brings us to the deeper question: what happens when distraction stops working? When spectacle no longer overwhelms evidence? When the audience, even a loyal one, begins to sense that the noise is not a show of strength, but an admission of danger?
That question hangs over Trump’s Christmas posts like an unresolved chord. And it points forward to a reckoning not just with Epstein, but with a political style that has depended for too long on the assumption that attention can always be controlled.
When Distraction Fails: Guilt, Power, and the Smell of Desperation
Authoritarian distraction only works when it carries the scent of confidence. When the spectacle feels effortless, the audience experiences it as strength. When it feels forced, it begins to register as fear. Trump’s Christmas Day performance carries the latter.
What stands out most, taken as a whole, is not the aggression of the Nigeria post or the fury of the Epstein post, but their simultaneity. This is a man frantically attempting to occupy every available narrative space at once. Violence abroad. Persecution at home. Christianity invoked. Enemies named. Hoaxes recalled. Loyalty demanded. Nothing left uncovered. Nothing left quiet. This is what desperation looks like when it has access to state power.
Trump’s defenders will argue that there is no proof of wrongdoing; that proximity is not guilt; that Epstein touched many powerful figures across political lines. All of that can be debated. But what cannot be ignored is behavioural evidence. People who are unconcerned by an allegation do not behave like this. They do not need to collapse every accusation into a single conspiracy or sanctify violence on Christmas Day to reassure their base that they are still in control.
The psychology here is revealing. Trump’s strategy is to outperform suspicion. He seeks to overwhelm doubt by projecting dominance. The Nigeria strike functions as a demonstration: I am still feared; I still command; I still kill. The subtext is clear. A guilty man hides. An innocent one strikes.
But this logic is brittle. It relies on an outdated model of power, one in which spectacle automatically silences scrutiny. That model assumes a base willing to suspend disbelief indefinitely. It assumes that enough noise can still erase pattern recognition. Yet Trump’s own language betrays an awareness that the old magic is fading.
In earlier scandals, Trump often responded with a kind of breezy contempt. Accusations were dismissed with jokes, nicknames, or casual mockery. Here, by contrast, the Epstein post is dense, angry, and oddly personal. It names former associates. It revisits old grievances. It insists, again and again, that this is just another hoax. Repetition replaces wit, volume replaces ease.
This tonal shift matters. It suggests that Trump understands the Epstein Files differently from previous scandals. He does not treat them as a passing inconvenience. He treats them as a recurring threat, something that keeps returning no matter how often it is declared dead. That persistence is dangerous, because it corrodes the central myth of Trumpism: that Trump is persecuted by the system rather than entangled within it.
Epstein is not an outsider scandal. He is a system scandal. He implicates elite social worlds, financial secrecy, institutional protection, and the selective application of justice. He does not sit comfortably within the populist narrative of Trump as lone warrior against corruption. Instead, he raises the possibility that Trump is one of the beneficiaries of elite impunity.
This is why the display of power becomes so theatrical. Trump is reasserting hierarchy. By reminding his audience that he can order strikes, that he can kill and merge religion with violence and face no consequence, he is making an implicit argument: people like me do not answer questions. People like me decide who is punished.
That argument is reinforced by the absence of empathy in both posts. There is no acknowledgment of victims, neither Nigerian civilians caught in cycles of violence nor Epstein’s victims, whose suffering is erased entirely. In Trump’s narrative universe, suffering only counts when it can be weaponised. Christians are invoked as symbols. Trump himself is invoked as a victim. Everyone else disappears.
This erasure is a signal. When leaders feel secure, they can afford moments of humanity. When they feel threatened, humanity becomes expendable. What we are witnessing, then, is escalation. Trump is pushing the emotional register higher because lower levels no longer suffice. He is invoking faith because policy is insufficient. He is invoking death because denial is no longer enough.
But escalation always carries risk. History is littered with examples of rulers who mistook noise for control, violence for legitimacy, and loyalty for truth. In each case, the pattern was similar: as accountability closed in, displays of power intensified; as doubt spread, enemies multiplied; as fear grew, repression became theatrical.
None of this proves guilt in a legal sense. But politics is not a courtroom. It is a field of signals. And the signal Trump is sending now is not one of calm authority. It is one of a man who knows that something will not stay buried, and who is willing to burn as much attention, morality, and meaning as necessary to keep it that way.
The tragedy for Trump and for the political culture that sustains him, is that this strategy may already be failing. The more naked the distraction, the more it invites scrutiny. The more exaggerated the righteousness, the hollower it sounds. The gleam, as one might say, has tarnished. And when power begins to look desperate, it starts to look guilty, even if no verdict has yet been delivered.
The final question, then, is not whether Trump can keep shouting “hoax,” or even whether he can keep staging spectacles of violence. It is whether enough people are still willing to confuse volume with innocence, and power with truth. That question takes us to the endgame: what happens when the audience stops looking where it is told, and starts looking where it is not meant to? That is where this story is heading.
Why This Time May Be Different: Tarnish, Fatigue, and the Limits of the Spell
Trump’s political survival has always depended on a fragile but potent illusion: that loyalty can outpace evidence, and that spectacle can indefinitely substitute for truth. For years, that illusion held, and each scandal was drowned in noise. But illusions do not break all at once. They fray.
What feels different now is not the existence of another Trump controversy, but the texture of the response to it. The Epstein Files are not a single explosive revelation that can be contained within a news cycle. They are a slow, corrosive presence which offer no satisfaction of closure. They refuse to resolve into either vindication or condemnation. They simply persist, and persistence is corrosive to myth.
Epstein is different to previous scandals. He represents continuity. He ties Trump to the very elite ecosystems he claims to oppose. Every resurfacing of Epstein-related material quietly undermines the populist story without needing to shout. This is where fatigue enters the picture. Trump’s base has proven extraordinarily tolerant of scandal, but tolerance is not infinite. Distraction asks supporters to repeatedly suspend doubt, trust instinct over evidence, and that everything is unpleasant is a hoax. Over time, that suspension becomes harder to maintain, not because belief collapses, but because effort accumulates. What we see in Trump’s Christmas posts is the strain of that effort.
The language is louder, the symbolism heavier, the enemies more numerous. Christianity is invoked more explicitly. Violence is celebrated more openly. The appeal is to transcendence, to the idea that Trump is not just a political figure, but a chosen one, operating above ordinary moral constraints. That is a sign not of confidence, but of necessity. When rational loyalty weakens, faith must fill the gap.
Yet faith-based politics has its own limits. Faith can override doubt, but it cannot easily override pattern recognition. And patterns are becoming harder to ignore: the recurring need to redirect attention, the repeated insistence that every allegation is identical in origin and motive. There is also a growing reliance on spectacle at moments of vulnerability. These are not isolated tactics as they form a recognisable shape.
This is the danger Trump now faces. Not mass defection, not sudden enlightenment, but something quieter: a thinning of attention. A fraction of the audience stops reacting with the same intensity. A fraction stops sharing, stops defending, stops investing emotional energy in each new outrage. They may not turn against Trump, but they stop moving when he pulls the strings.
Trump’s strategy requires his base not just to agree with him, but to feel with him: to feel besieged when he claims persecution, to feel triumphant when he displays power, to feel righteous when he invokes faith. If those emotional reflexes dull, even slightly, the machinery begins to falter.
And still, the Epstein Files remain. Not because of partisan obsession, but because they sit at the intersection of money, power, sex, and silence — an intersection that modern societies are increasingly unwilling to ignore entirely. The cultural climate has changed. Movements around abuse, accountability, and institutional complicity have altered what can be dismissed forever.
Trump’s political style was forged in an era where sheer volume could overwhelm truth. But volume has diminishing returns. At a certain point, noise becomes background. Spectacle becomes expected. Outrage becomes routine. And when everything is shocking, nothing shocks.
This does not mean that Trump is finished, or that his base will suddenly abandon him. It means something subtler and more dangerous for an authoritarian figure: that his control over attention is no longer absolute. That he must work harder for the same effect. That each escalation yields less return.
Power that depends on constant performance is vulnerable to exhaustion. It must always be louder than yesterday, more righteous than last time, more violent than before. Eventually, the escalation outruns credibility. The spell begins to wobble, not because people reject it outright, but because they no longer feel compelled by it.
Trump’s Christmas Day attempt to bomb the Epstein Files away may yet succeed in the short term. Distraction still works. Faith still binds. Loyalty still holds. But it no longer works effortlessly. When illusion becomes labour, its end is no longer a question of if, but of when.
Conclusion: You Can’t Bomb a Paper Trail
Donald Trump’s Christmas Day performance was the behaviour of a man attempting to manage reality through force, faith, and noise. The attempt to bury the Epstein Files beneath a spectacle of sanctified violence reveals something fundamental about how Trump understands power. Power, in this worldview, is exemption. It is the ability to redirect attention at will, to substitute moral theatre for factual reckoning, and to ensure that loyalty overwhelms evidence. When Trump orders airstrikes and frames them as divine justice, he is not only acting abroad. He is signalling at home: this is what power looks like, and this is who wields it.
The Nigeria strike, framed as defence of Christians on Christmas Day, was not incidental to the Epstein post. It was its counterweight. One story asked uncomfortable questions about proximity, complicity, and elite protection. The other offered catharsis, righteousness, and closure. Together, they formed a single political manoeuvre: distraction elevated into doctrine.
For years, this strategy worked because it rested on an unspoken assumption: that enough noise could still dissolve truth. That if belief could be polarised quickly enough, facts would lose their grip. That outrage, spectacle, and grievance could always outpace scrutiny. But the Epstein Files expose the limits of that assumption.
They do not rely on a single explosive revelation. They persist. They resurface. They refuse to conform to the rhythms of distraction. Each time Trump calls them a hoax, he tacitly acknowledges their endurance. Each time he invokes persecution rather than evidence, he confirms that denial alone is insufficient.
Each time he escalates, louder, holier, more violent, he reveals the strain. This does not mean justice is imminent. Power rarely relinquishes itself neatly. There may never be a courtroom reckoning o full transparency. The system that protected Epstein has shown little appetite for dismantling itself.
But something else is happening, and it matters. The illusion that Trump can always control attention is weakening. Not collapsing but certainly weakening. The gleam has tarnished. The spectacle no longer dazzles as reliably. The patterns are becoming visible. And visibility is the enemy of distraction.
You cannot bomb a paper trail. You cannot airstrike a memory. You cannot invoke Christmas, Christianity, or the Department of War into erasing documents, testimony, and repetition. You can only delay the reckoning, and the longer the delay, the more conspicuous the effort becomes.
Trump’s Christmas posts were meant to project mastery. Instead, they exposed anxiety. They told a story not of a man unbothered by accusation, but of one increasingly haunted by what will not go away.
Power that must shout innocence is already in trouble. Power that must sanctify violence to command loyalty is brittle. And power that depends on distraction is always one unanswered question away from collapse. The Epstein Files will not disappear; they endure, and endurance is what power fears most.
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References:
The Guardian (2025) ‘US carries out airstrikes on Islamic State ‘scum’ in Nigeria,’ The Guardian, 25 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/25/us-carries-out-airstrikes-against-islamic-state-terrorist-scum-in-nigeria-trump-says [Accessed: 26 December 2025].
New York Post (2025) ‘Justice Department defends Trump as latest batch of Epstein files released,’ New York Post, 23 December. Available at: https://nypost.com/2025/12/23/us-news/justice-department-preemptively-defends-trump-as-latest-batch-of-epstein-files-released-unfounded-and-false [Accessed: 26 December 2025].
Plague Island (2025) ‘Exposure Without Consequence: How a Redacted Epstein Files Release Protects the Predator Class,’ 20 December. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/exposure-without-consequence-how [Accessed: 26 December 2025].
Reuters (2025) ‘US says it struck Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria,’ Reuters, 25 December. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-launches-strikes-against-islamic-state-militants-northwest-nigeria-trump-says-2025-12-25 [Accessed: 26 December 2025].
We are really living strange times. Very ordinarily and predictably written posts by an unimpressive individual attract intelligent and well written analysis.