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£1,500. The new Statesman.

After years of stoking the conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump has decided it's time for his base to move on and, quote, not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein.

So will that work?

Or could this finally be the issue that drives a wedge between the US president and his MAGA faithful?

And what are Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance doing in the UK this summer?

I'm Katie Stallard, and this is the New Statesman podcast.

I'm joined by my colleague and New Statesman U.S. correspondent Freddie Hayward to discuss.

So, Freddie, you have written a piece for the New Statesman this week, grappling with Trump, Epstein and MAGA.

Yeah.

This is a conspiracy story inside a conspiracy story inside a mystery, trapped in a riddle. So I wonder if we start with the Trump-Ebstein politics. And in particular, I guess the role of the Epstein conspiracy theory or valid questions, depending on your perspective, has played in Trump's political campaigns over the year. How has he seized on this? How has he used this? And what were

his supporters really expecting he would do once he got back into the White House and was in a

position to finally take some action here.

What we have to recognise is how important conspiracy theories are to MAGA world.

They're the sort of pistons on which the MAGA mythos drives is driven and fuels itself.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga, I think, is much more powerful than some of the others because it's rooted in certain truths. You know, he was a notorious, a notorious sexual predator. There were genuine

questions around his death. There are genuine questions about his connections to other people.

So there are certain people who are journalists or, you know, non-conspiratorial thinkers

...