On Tuesday, Donald Trump ducked responsibility for retweeting a comedian’s theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton are secretly behind the apparent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. “The retweet—which is what it was, just a retweet—was from somebody that’s a very respected conservative pundit, so I think that was fine,” he told reporters. “A big Trump fan...he’s a man who has half a million followers.“ But like anyone who feels in their gut that they know the secret conspiracies of the ultra-elite, Trump remained adamant. “I know he was on his plane 27 times, and he said he was on the plane four times,” Trump continued. “But when they checked the plane logs, Bill Clinton—who was a very good friend of Epstein—he was on the plane about 27 or 28 times. So why did he say four times?”

As for the recent raid on Little St. James, which locals dubbed “Pedophile Island” and “Orgy Island”? “The question you have to ask is, did Bill Clinton go to the island? Because Epstein had an island. That was not a good place, as I understand it, and I was never there,” Trump continued. “So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”

Trump, of course, has always been a conspiracy truther, prone to believing and amplifying the most absurd explanations for prosaic events. Even before his presidency he claimed that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to the assassination of JFK, suggested a link between autism and vaccines, argued that asbestos poisoning was a “con,” and hinted that Joe Scarborough killed an intern. He is particularly fond of conspiracies that advance his political agenda, such as the notion that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The death of Epstein, then, provided Trump with a veritable treasure trove of red thumbtacks with which to connect the dots between all his favorite sorts of targets: wealthy elites, allegations of horrifying misconduct covered up by powerful people, and former friend turned useful foil Bill Clinton. One could sense his tangible joy over the weekend as he retweeted other far-right sources claiming that Clinton had flown to “pedophilia island.” (A spokesperson for Clinton said that he “knows nothing about the terrible crimes,” never visited the island, and had not spoken to Epstein in “well over a decade.”)

In a follow-up statement this week, after Trump discovered his new Whitewater, the spokesperson added that the president’s allegations were “ridiculous, and of course not true—and Donald Trump knows it. Has he triggered the 25th Amendment yet?”

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