THE COST OF EPSTEIN SCANDAL CLICKBAIT: How Journalists Brainwashed Trump’s Would-be Assassin
The ballroom at the Washington Hilton was filled with sounds typical of the occasion. The clinking of crystal glasses. The clattering and scraping of knives and forks on porcelain plates. Journalists nattering away over white-clothed tables, trading gossip and trying their best to use the event to grab fleeting moments with politicians and, if lucky enough, cabinet officials.
But the noises of this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner suddenly found themselves impinged by multiple pops. Not from champagne corks, but from gunfire arising from the intrusion of a begruntled gatecrasher – a lone young man brainwashed by the very industry the horrified guests represent.
Within seconds, President Trump was rushed away by Secret Service agents while the high heeled and gowned and the suited and booted alike hid side-by-side beneath tabletops. Confused, their eyes darted around in vain for sight of the shooter, none of them contemplating, during or after the incident, the fact that they themselves were largely responsible for him being there.
The following morning, the familiar machine had already begun to turn.
The attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was immediately folded into America’s permanent civil war of narrative. Some commentators rushed to frame the suspect, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, as merely unstable, detached from politics altogether. Others treated the event as another regrettable but almost inevitable consequence of “polarisation” in the abstract, as though violent political obsession appears out of humidity like summer lightning.
But there is an uglier truth sitting beneath the velvet tablecloths of American media culture. One that journalists, editors, television bookers and partisan commentators do not want to confront.
For years now, substantial sections of the press have abandoned the discipline of evidence whenever Donald Trump intersects with Jeffrey Epstein.
Not scrutiny. Not investigation. Those are legitimate.
Narrative.
A false narrative - fuelled by political bias and a desire held by many journalists to exploit the Epstein scandal to smear Trump - repeated so relentlessly, so emotionally, so irresponsibly, that millions of Americans now speak about Trump as though his ‘criminal guilt’ in the Epstein scandal were already established fact rather than it being the great big nothing burger that the evidence so evidently reveals the allegations against him to be.
Allen’s ‘manifesto’ (more of a brief unhinged message sent to his friends and family) was swiftly released by the media without a hint of self-awareness. In it, he listed what motivated him to attempt to kill Trump and others connected to him. And those motivations were based on politically-motivated myths perpetuated by those same journalists and media outlets who have for many years now intentionally lied to you about the Epstein scandal in the hope that clickbait, as well as bringing in advertising revenue, can bring down a President.
The manifesto referred to Trump as a “pedophile” and “rapist,” language that mirrors years of maximalist rhetoric saturating social media, cable television panels, activist journalism, and algorithmically amplified political discourse.
They may not have pulled the trigger. But by intentionally ignoring the truth and sacrificing basic journalistic ethics and integrity to produce populist-style sensationalism and demonisation of Trump, contrary to the evidence (you can read one of my reports debunking one of the Epstein/Trump allegations by clicking the article below), they most certainly placed the gun in Allen’s hands.
Journalists from CNN, the BBC, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, and from practically every newspaper and news channel on the planet, have spent over a decade completely exaggerating the Epstein scandal, censoring inconvenient facts, whipping the world’s population into a frenzied witch hunt, and brainwashing folks like Allen to boiling point.
The media’s coverage of the Epstein scandal, its dangerous deployment of guilt by accusation, and the way in which it has demonised innocent men such as President Trump and his former lawyer, the esteemed Alan Dershowitz (whom was later proven to have been falsely accused by the late Virginia Giuffre) is perhaps the best example of the dangers and destructive nature of ‘fake news’ that we have ever seen and are ever likely to see.
When an entire ecosystem repeatedly dissolves the distinction between suspicion, association, allegation, inference, and proof, unstable people often absorb the final emotional conclusion without understanding the evidentiary gaps that responsible journalism is supposed to protect.
There is a reason traditional newsroom standards once existed like load-bearing walls inside a fragile building. Verification before publication. Corroboration. Distinguishing fact from speculation. Separating commentary from reporting. Avoiding guilt by association.
Those principles were not invented to protect politicians. They were invented to protect civilisation from the consequences of mass emotional manipulation.
Trump unquestionably knew Epstein socially during the 1980s and 1990s before he banned him from Mar-a-Lago and severed all ties. That is documented. Photographs exist. Videos exist. Trump himself publicly commented on Epstein long before Epstein’s first arrest. None of that is disputed.
But what is also true, and almost never stated with equal force in many modern anti-Trump narratives, is that no criminal charge has ever accused Trump of participating in Epstein’s trafficking operation. No court has convicted him of crimes related to Epstein. No released document has established the sweeping certainty with which social media activists and even some mainstream commentators now speak.
That distinction matters enormously, especially in a country already boiling with political paranoia. Especially after multiple assassination attempts against the same political figure.
Fast-paced, social media-orientated modern media culture increasingly rewards emotional certainty over factual restraint. The incentive structure is grotesque. Journalists who urge caution or implore the employment of fact-checking disappear beneath the algorithm. Journalists who imply dark conspiracies and unsubstantiated, often bullshit-riddled allegations receive millions of impressions, television invitations, podcast appearances, subscriptions, outrage-sharing, and political tribal applause.
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal became the perfect delivery system for this pathology because, thanks to the media’s misrepresentation of the case, Epstein now represents genuine evil, a global child trafficking network (that doesn’t actually exist), and ultimate elite depravity. The story carries the emotional temperature of a horror film fused with class warfare. Once attached to Trump, many journalists stopped behaving like investigators and began behaving like prosecutors addressing a jury they assumed was already emotionally convinced.
Even language changed, particularly during the shambolic, deplorable coverage of thee Epstein files.
“Linked to.”
“Connected to.”
“Named in.”
“Associated with.”
Phrases carefully constructed to imply criminal intimacy without crossing the legal threshold required for outright accusation.
This is how modern narrative engineering works. Not through direct lies alone, but through accumulation. Atmosphere. Suggestion repeated until suspicion hardens psychologically into certainty. And once certainty arrives, violence becomes easier for damaged minds to rationalise.
We saw it with Pizzagate – a brainwashed gunman barging into a family eatery in Washington in search of the hidden child-trafficker’s basement that didn’t exist. We saw it with Qanon – Ashli Babbett, similarly tumbling down pedo-ring-focused rabbit holes and being shot to death trying to storm the heart of American politics.
And now we have seen it in the form of a man who may never have made that foolish decision to pack a gun and head out to a dinner function had journalists not constantly fed him with emotive, hugely irresponsible lies about Epstein and Trump’s former association that led him to firmly yet wrongly believe that Trump is, as he wrote in his manifesto, ‘a pedophile’.
We are now finally also seeing something else: The consequences of clickbait.
Researchers studying political violence and online radicalisation have repeatedly found that emotionally charged narrative ecosystems intensify extremism and moral absolutism. A person who genuinely believes they are confronting a monstrous existential evil is psychologically far closer to justifying violence than someone who merely disagrees with a politician’s tax policy.
This is precisely why journalistic ethics matter. Not because journalists are priests of objectivity. Absolute objectivity does not exist. But because disciplined scepticism toward one’s own political desires is the firewall separating reporting from propaganda.
Too many modern reporters no longer even pretend to maintain that firewall where Trump is concerned.
One of the most corrosive developments in contemporary American journalism is the moral self-licensing that emerged during the Trump era. Many journalists convinced themselves that Trump represented such an extraordinary threat that traditional standards could be relaxed in pursuit of a higher moral cause. Anonymous sourcing standards weakened. Sensational framing increased. Thinly sourced stories received explosive coverage before collapsing quietly days later. Speculation blurred into headline-writing.
The result has been catastrophic for public trust.
Americans, and indeed many of us around the world now inhabit parallel realities where basic factual consensus barely survives longer than a news cycle.
The irony is suffocating.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner itself exists partly as a symbolic celebration of democratic accountability and the importance of a free press. Yet the shooting this week unfolded inside an information culture where large sections of the public no longer trust the press to distinguish activism from journalism.
That distrust did not appear spontaneously. It was earned.
You can read my latest wrangling with the BBC over their proven false reporting over the Epstein scandal by clicking the article below. It is just on example amongst thousands.
None of this means Trump should be immune from scrutiny. Far from it. Powerful people deserve aggressive investigative reporting. The Epstein scandal absolutely deserved exposure and investigation at every level.
But ethical journalism requires proportion, precision, and restraint even when covering people one personally despises. Especially then, I’d suggest.
Because once journalism becomes openly outcome-driven, it stops functioning as journalism and becomes narrative warfare.
And narrative warfare eventually produces casualties.
The media cannot spend years saturating the public sphere with emotionally maximalist insinuations, collapsing distinctions between allegation and proof, portraying political opponents as existential monsters, and then act shocked when unstable individuals decide they are participating in some grand moral crusade.
Why are myself and Jessica Reed Kraus the only journalists who seem to understand this when it comes to reporting on the Epstein scandal? Isn’t it obvious that lying to the public and spreading widespread fear and anger over a mythical elite child-trafficking consisting of world leaders and influential individuals can only ever have a negative outcome?
At some point, journalism must rediscover the ancient and unfashionable discipline of humility and responsibility - not because Trump deserves protection, but because the public does.
Because facts do.
Because a civilisation cannot survive indefinitely when millions of people are emotionally conditioned to experience political opponents not as fellow citizens, but as irredeemable monsters whose destruction feels morally righteous.
The bullets outside the Hilton ballroom were fired by one man, a man whose life and the lives of his family members will be changed forever. But the atmosphere surrounding them was built collectively, sentence by sentence, chyron by chyron, headline by headline, until reality itself became secondary to narrative momentum.
And somewhere beneath the glittering chandeliers of Washington, the press should now find itself confronting a question it has spent years demanding others answer:
What happens when rhetoric stops being metaphor and starts drawing blood?