Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump Joe Raedle/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment What did the president really know about a cushy remote getaway for the private-plane elite? No, not that president and not that conspiracy - I'm talking about Paradise, Dan Fogelman's crackling Hulu drama in which James Marsden plays a commander-in-chief with secret plans to ferry the privileged to a deep-in-the-mountain community when an apocalypse befalls Earth. The show earned a surprise Emmys drama nomination this week, just as some figures on both the right and left were busy resurrecting their favorite real-world thriller: the tangled conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Paradise is fiction. The Epstein saga is not. But both feel cut from the same cloth of powerful people and the secrets they keep from us. Related Stories Business Trump Files $10 Billion Lawsuit Against News Corp., Rupert Murdoch Over Story on Epstein Ties News Epstein, Diddy Prosecutor Maurene Comey Speaks Out After Firing: "Fear Is The Tool of a Tyrant" Hollywood has actually spent decades on exactly this kind of story, chronicling conspiracies at the highest but darkest levels of government, crimes committed by the very people charged with protecting us. From the moment Warren Beatty started hunting around for a Senator-assassination coverup in The Parallax View back in the '70's, we've been subject to a steady parade of buried files, vanishing witnesses and covert programs - and inevitably the lone heroes who root them all out. Mulder and Scully solved those mysteries the FBI didn't want solved on The X-Files, Jason Bourne figured out what Conklin was actually up to at the CIA in The Bourne Identity, and most recently The Night Agent and Paradise had some very plucky marginal types figure out what's really happening at The White House. So when a story pops up like Epstein, with all its mysterious millions and powerful people in the (sometimes literal) background, with all its legitimately open questions about a suspect with White House connections dying in federal custody, we're primed not just to see a news story - we're primed to see a movie. Without them or even us knowing it, the entertainment industry has been readying us for this story for fifty years. On their own, of course, most of these Hollywood government-coverup tales are harmless and even welcome entertainments, fertilizer for the human imagination. But pour on it the fuel of our polarized politics and algorithmic outrage and watch it explode. A story like Epstein is colliding with personal beliefs and prejudices (it's hard to avoid the anti-elite and at times, frankly, antisemitic undercurrents here), along with Trump's own history of Hollywood-derived conspiracy showmanship on QAnon and Obama birther theory, to detonate in, well, exactly the ways we're seeing now. Hollywood tells these stories by dramatic imperative - dangling that the truth is out there makes for much better storytelling than suggesting those mysterious lights were just illuminating the path of an airplane. So It feels too easy to implicate film and television in this factless frenzy. But it's also a cop-out to exempt them entirely. As the film critic Laura Venning wrote in the journal Curzon last year, while movies like Oliver Stone's JFK feel "akin to a guilty pleasure" and "you could certainly question whether there's any harm" to them, a "decade ago the idea that a former President could instigate an insurrection over patently false claims that an election had been stolen from him would [also] have been unimaginable." Sometimes Hollywood stories do involve real criminality, as with All The President's Men. More often though they have tilted toward JFK, cozying up just close enough to the truth to make us believe in non-existent cabals. And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it's playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable-news broadcasts and bar-side phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification. A convicted sex offender killed himself in 2019 in federal prison awaiting trial after a whole set of fresh revelations of alleged sex trafficking. That left both a black hole where the alleged perpetrator's testimony would have gone and a juicy mystery left unsolved; if it wasn't a suicide, as the government was saying, who might have wanted Epstein dead? Numerous investigations followed, with many Rolodexes and other material published to sate the beast. All accompanied by tell of elusive "files" that would supposedly implicate all kinds of powerful people on some mythical list. With so many Internet s