So often when Donald Trump is cornered, he manages to escape thanks to a simple tactic: He cries hoax. With his latest troubles—caused by his administration’s declaration that there’s nothing new to see or investigate regarding deceased pedophile and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—Trump is once again screaming “hoax.” Yet it is not quite doing the trick.
One of Trump’s brilliant moves as a demagogic politician was to train his supporters to believe that he was the target of conspiratorial forces and “fake news.” So whenever he was hit by a critical news report or investigation, he could explain it away by declaring that he was a victim of evil forces that aimed to destroy the nation.
This began in the earliest days of his first presidency. As the press, the FBI, and congressional committees investigated Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russia, Trump tried to swat all that away by declaring it was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”—a product of “fake news.” No matter that the intelligence community, a special counsel, and congressional committees repeatedly confirmed the basic facts of that scandal—Vladimir Putin launched a covert operation to try to help Trump win, and Trump and his campaign aided and abetted that attack by repeatedly echoing Putin’s false denials—Trump consistently repeated these catchphrases. “Russia, Russia, Russia” became the derisive nickname he deployed to obliterate a significant reality of the 2016 election.
It worked.
His devotees fully embraced his characterization. Right-wing media constantly cast the Russia investigation as a scheme orchestrated by Democrats, something called the Deep State, and mainstream media. For Trumpland, it was indeed a “hoax.” For instance, Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, has routinely asserted that the Russia inquiry was “the greatest political scandal” in US history, describing it as a con job entirely cooked up by spooks, Dems, and journalists. He has gone so far as to claim absurdly that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election.
Once Trump established this Russia hoax narrative, he found he could apply it to other jams. When he was impeached for the first time for having threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, launched an investigation of Joe Biden, Trump called this affair a “hoax,” comparing it to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It was also a “witch hunt,” a “scam,” and a “sham.” Once more, Trump was the victim of diabolical plotting. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s Republican defenders tried to deflect from the topic at hand by tossing out conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.
When Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, it was, in his view, another “hoax.” The Deep State—along with China, Venezuela, Dominion Voting Systems, the media, Italian satellite operators, and election workers in Atlanta—had rigged the election. Trump’s assaults on the news media for covering up the purported theft of the election were a callback to his “Russia, Russia, Russia” rhetoric.
After the insurrectionist January 6 riot that Trump incited, as the House moved toward a second impeachment of Trump, he again hurled the same charge: “The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of our country.” For Trump, every new political or legal threat he faced was an extension of the vicious and underhanded war against him that began with the Russia investigation.
When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, his spokesman declared, “The Democrats have spent seven years fabricating hoaxes and witch hunts against President Trump, and the recent unprecedented and unnecessary raid is just another example of exactly that.” Trump called the prosecution that ended with him being convicted of 34 felony counts a “scam” and a “sham.” And E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of sexual assault? “It is a hoax and a lie just like all the other hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” Trump said in a deposition. At her one debate with Trump during the 2024 election, Kamala Harris slammed Trump for having said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white supremacists that became violent; two days later, Trump called this the “Charlottesville hoax.”
In each of these episodes, the hoax strategy succeeded. At least with his people. MAGA World stood by him, and the right-wing media embraced his false accusations. So much so he won his way back to the White House.
Now he’s facing a tsunami of outrage and criticism from Republicans and MAGA champions for sitting on Epstein material that they assume would bolster their long-running QAnon-ish conspiracy theories. And Trump, yet again, is turning to his standby sidestep. He’s calling this a “hoax.”
As the anger swelled among his flock this past weekend, on his social media platform, Trump compared the fuss to the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” He complained that “selfish people” were trying to “hurt” his “PERFECT Administration” over Epstein. He asserted that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” That is, he was advancing another conspiracy theory: His enemies had concocted fake Epstein files. That didn’t make much sense. But Trump was trying to rope this latest hullabaloo into his long-running “hoax” narrative.
That post did not stem the fury from the right. Many replies to it were from self-declared Trump backers who expressed dismay that Trump was not keeping what they believed was a promise to tell all about Epstein. MAGA influencers called for firing Attorney General Pam Bondi. Congressional Republicans urged the release of files from the Epstein case.
On Wednesday, Trump tried again with another post. He once more proclaimed the whole Epstein thing was a hoax akin to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He brayed, “these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at – It’s all they have… Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.” He pulled out his classic pushback: the “Fake News” and Democrats were orchestrating “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
Talking to reporters in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump reiterated his new mantra: “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four year….Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net… I call it the Epstein hoax.”
Factcheck: Trump was not telling the truth. Most of the noise about the Epstein files has arisen not from Democrats but from MAGA—people who Trump now denounces as idiots and “past supporters.” And Trump, no surprise, did not specify what he means by “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” There’s no question that his Justice Department and FBI released a memo declaring that Epstein had committed suicide and that there were no new and undisclosed revelations—and no so-called clients list—within the files of his two criminal cases. Where’s the hoax? It looked as if Trump believed that after all these years of pushing the “hoax” button, he could do so once again as a getaway. Drop the H-word and—presto!—his believers will fall in line.
But the MAGA crowd wants more. After years of the right promoting conspiracy theories that demonized Democrats and elites as cannibals and pedophilic globalists—see Pizzagate and QAnon—Trumpers expected the Trump administration to finally produce the goods with presumed evidence from the Epstein case. Patel, Donald Trump Jr., deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and other MAGA leaders had long demanded the Epstein files be released. Trump himself had indicated he would do that if elected to a second term.
Instead, nothing has been revealed, and Trump is saying it’s time to move on and castigating his fans who feel betrayed. That’s not playing well. There’s no telling yet if his familiar move of yelling “hoax” will work this time. His steady shouts of “hoax” over the years have themselves been a long-running hoax. Usually, his voters responded as he wished. This time they may see the real hoax.
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This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.