Epstein Won't Die
Trump names me in his lawsuit against WSJ for story on Jeffrey Epstein letter
Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal mentions yours truly. Now’s the part where I moan about how persecuted I am. Except I’m not. More than anything, I’m amused.
The suit denies the existence of any birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein (including a nude drawing) as alleged by the Journal on Thursday. With repeated references to “viral” online posts — down to the total number of “impressions” they generated — a theme quickly emerges that is both funny and deeply suggestive of Trump’s obsession with social media. The president of the United States, it would seem, is as hooked into the IV drip of the social media feed as anyone.
“Ken Klippenstein, an independent social media influencer with over 543,000 followers on X.com, republished the headline and several false and defamatory statements from the Article. To date, his republication has received over 1,000,000 unique impressions.”
With characteristic bitchiness, Trump’s lawyers call me a “social media influencer” instead of a journalist; in their view a slight. But I feel differently.
I welcome Trump’s contempt: the day that any president labels me a journalist is the day I’ll wonder if I still am one (and you should, too!)
Trump’s 18-page filing against the Journal, one seeking damages for making him into a laughingstock and a spectacle, dedicates roughly four pages to how “viral” the Journal’s allegations about the birthday letter went.
A section titled “The Article goes Viral” says that the Journal article was “widely republished and discussed on the internet’s watering hole: X.com [Twitter].” It’s really more of a sewer (I say that somewhat affectionately), but again the language here is telling. Trump seems to think Twitter is some water cooler-like facet of American daily life, rather than a thunderdome for politics obsessed weirdos concentrated in Washington. Other presidents have of course had distorted views about the importance of various media (recall Obama’s fixation with what Times columnist David Brooks wrote about him), but Trump may be the first for whom it’s social media.
Reading the detailed breakdown of the number of impressions generated by my post (down to the thousand!), I had to laugh. Note the use of the word “impressions,” which unlike “views,” is an elastic term designed to inflate influence. X defines impressions as the total number of times a post appears anywhere on a user’s screen for any amount of time, whether or not they stop to read it. So impressions always overstate the number of people who actually read through a post. I imagine that it is precisely the type of term Trump’s boot-lickers use to prepare the president’s daily brief, which is to say that they want to slap the boss on the back for being so influential.
An aside about Elon Musk’s X. Even if social media is as important as Trump seems to think, X doesn’t even rank among the top five platforms by active users — that is, by the normal population. The fact that the lawsuit focuses on X exclusively instead of far larger platforms like, say, YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, should give you a sense of the outsized importance that Trump assigns to the microblogging platform.
To give X its due, however, it is the domain of the political insiders and media movers and shakers who want 24-7, up-to-the-second everything. It has outsize influence because even governments favor X to make their announcements. Both news media and influencers monitor it as a spawning pool where urgent “BREAKING” headlines are born, often of dubious importance or even basic accuracy but which create their own reality nonetheless.
On that note, while I certainly support the calls for greater transparency in the Epstein scandal — especially given the massive discrepancy in the victim count, as I’ve reported — I’m skeptical about its salience to people outside of this Twitter world I’m describing. But since Trump lives in that world, it’s no surprise that the Epstein issue is driving him crazy.
Donald Trump has been forced to eat his own words in large part because he’s lost control of that 24/7 narrative, his voice drowned out by claims that even MAGA is breaking with the president, which is itself questionable because the measure is MAGA influencers screaming and splashing in the spawning pool I described earlier.
I’m not saying social media doesn’t matter. I certainly hope it does, given the amount of time I spend on it myself! But the idea that it’s a meaningful indicator of public sentiment — as opposed to, say, what’s trending on the broader internet outside of Twitter, or actual protests (which the Trump administration has repeatedly cast as shadowy foreign-funded plots) — is laughable.
Trump’s far from the only one who’s fallen prey to this misconception. Just take a look at all the officials in Washington convinced that the college protests against the war in Gaza are the result of some foreign-sponsored TikTok psyop, or their latest: that Mamdani defeated Cuomo in New York because he’s some kind of social media virtuoso.
Trump largely cares about what’s on social media and he surrounds himself with others who are equally addicted to the morphine drip of impressions and virality. Vice President JD Vance recently invaded a relatively obscure, liberal-dominated social media platform called Bluesky, trolling its users about Trump running for a third term. I’m sure this won him accolades from the blue check crowd on Twitter but the vast majority of people have no idea what Bluesky even is!
Meanwhile, Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, despite his responsibility to stop the next 9/11, sits on X day and night, commenting on seemingly everything but terrorism (the man has racked up almost 150,000 posts in total!), while hourly telling his benefactor how great he is.
Even Trump’s lawyers don’t get it, how influencers are part of the constellation of gods the president worships. More than anything, Donald Trump is angry that his online supporters have fallen for, as he sees it, the dastardly Democrat Party conspiracy to perpetuate Epstein. That the Wall Street Journal sullied his reputation or made him the center of attention isn’t any form of damage, not in the president’s eyes.
On that note, thanks for the shoutout, Mr. President!
— Edited by William M. Arkin
You are crushing them! Thank you for all you are risking to give us this service! What you are doing is making a change!
I am astonished that the word 'discovery' didn't arise in some lawyer's mind, because discovery is exactly what the WSJ is entitled to, and what comes of that could prove to be very interesting, indeed.