For years, the MAGA movement has thrived on one principle above all else: Don't trust the official story. You should question everything, assume that the official story is a pack of lies and reject the mainstream narrative, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — riddled with actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories — proved to be a breeding ground for this pattern.

But now, in one of the most absurd and revealing plot twists yet, the Trump administration — the very same administration that once swore it would release the Epstein client list, expose the elites and burn the whole corrupt system to the ground — is suddenly telling us to relax. Nothing to see here. No "client list." No conspiracy. Epstein? Definitely not murdered. The official narrative, apparently, is now gospel.

Let's be clear: If all we had was this most recent DOJ and FBI update under a second Trump term saying "case closed," the sudden shrug would make a little more sense. After all, Jeffrey Epstein probably killed himself, and the existence of a deeply incriminating "client list" is ridiculously unlikely years after his death. But context matters, and the MAGA movement can't pretend it didn't stake a large chunk of its credibility on the promise to expose this very system. Trump himself promised transparency on Epstein, his allies repeated it and his surrogates blasted it out on a daily basis.

This even continued after Trump returned to the White House, with Pam Bondi orchestrating a literal photoshoot of right-wing influencers holding bound folders of Part One of "the Epstein files" — a massive nothingburger of publicly available documents. It was cringe masquerading as courage, made worse by the fact that the same Pam Bondi is now saying that there is apparently no Part Two ...

All of this is a betrayal of the very audience MAGA built, because the Epstein conspiracy isn't just a conspiracy. It's the Rosetta Stone of elite corruption: the one issue that transcends party lines. Americans on all sides believe something sinister happened here, and that Epstein was part of a system that protected the rich, the powerful and the perverse. Frankly, they have every reason to believe that. The man literally had a private island where he hosted some of the world's most powerful men, before and after he went to jail for pimping out children. His death may have been the end of the line for Epstein, but what about the men literally serviced by Epstein and his fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell? Does their wealth and power protect them from justice? Apparently so.

Of course, Trump didn't invent these suspicions, but he and the MAGA movement absolutely exploited them, positioning itself as the one chance to blow the lid off the entire thing. So you're surprised that people are distrustfully furious that his DOJ — staffed by Epstein conspiracy theorists — are saying we should just move on? And what about the glaringly shameless 180-degree flip demonstrated by his most loyal supporters?

Here's the deal: Americans aren't stupid. You can't spend half a decade telling Americans to question everything and then suddenly expect them to trust you when it's politically inconvenient. That's not how this works. If the Trump administration wants to retain any shred of credibility on this front, it needs to stop gaslighting the very people who believed in its mission, release everything it has, admit what it doesn't have and doesn't know, and at the very least stop pretending that telling the truth is now optional just because it might get messy.

MAGA taught millions of Americans to read between the lines. Don't act shocked when they read between your lines.

To find out more about Ian Haworth and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Natilyn Hicks Photography at Unsplash