I confess: I’ve been confused by all the buzz about Trump being implicated in the Epstein files. Isn’t he already a convicted felon? He was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in May 2024, related to a hush-money payment. He remains a convicted felon despite receiving an unconditional discharge, meaning no prison time, fines, or supervision were imposed.
So why the obsession over these Epstein files?
In an earlier post, I riffed on John Ford’s idea about the country’s need for heroes that are placed on pedestals, their mythology more important than the objective truth. I further wondered if we’re now living in a time dominated by self-styled anti-heroes: people who see themselves as like Batman, brooding vigilantes who operate outside the system for “good.”
Trump’s legal troubles obviously didn’t end his influence, in fact they likely bolstered it. His defenders support him not in spite of his convictions, but because of them. A perceived martyr to corrupt systems. Now, with newly surfaced documents (like a controversial sketch and note from Epstein’s 50th birthday book that appear to bear his signature, which he denies) Trump’s camp is spinning it as yet another fabricated smear.
This, to me, is the danger of the anti-hero myth: it allows one to be both criminal and crusader, sinner and savior, depending on the spin, and it feeds demand for conspiracies. So why are we even feeding into this narrative? Maybe because confronting the uncomfortable truth is harder than trading in the drama of defiance.
At a certain point, if you keep positioning yourself inside the narrative that Trump’s supporters have built, where he’s the bad guy and you’re the good guy, you’re still playing their game. It only reinforces their version of reality and locks you into opposition on their terms. The more productive move is to step back, zoom out, and realize you don’t have to accept option A or option B. There’s a larger reality that exists beyond either of those choices.
And of course there’s a personal lesson in that too. It’s a reminder not to reject the shadows within ourselves, but to learn to recognize, accept, and even embrace them. If we keep pushing them down, ignoring them, or casting them as diametrically opposed to who we are, we only isolate those parts of us. And when they’re isolated, they tend to cause more damage than if we had met them with honesty and compassion.
