I’ve long been loath to dip a toe into the stinking MAGA sewer, lest I suffer a foot infection impervious to even the strongest antibiotics. But there are times when attention must be paid, and if I can lighten the narrative with dollops of levity, then all the better.

Which brings us to the current flap over Jeffrey Epstein, a classic illustration of Puck’s lament as penned by Shakespeare: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Trump and his apparatchiks had promised to release the so-called “Epstein files,” exposing the dead sexual predator’s ties to a purportedly secret cabal of elitist deep state pedophiles. Last fall, podcaster Dan Bongino (now the FBI deputy director) told listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal.” As recently as February, MAGA attorney general Pam Bondi told Fox News the Epstein material was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Now they’re suddenly saying that no such files exist and everyone should just move on.

It’s just fine, apparently, if the regime throws millions of people off health care and severs food assistance to the hungry and imposes tariffs that hike inflation and disappears people off the street and builds a spider’s web of gulags. But reneging on a beloved conspiracy theory is the one outrage that detonates the heads of the true believers.

Trump built his political brand by stoking conspiracy theories, and an entire right-wing media ecosystem has peddled his idiocies to millions of weak minds. He started circa 2011 with his viral lie that President Obama was not American-born (we’re still waiting to hear from the “detectives” he claimed to have hired). Ever since, we’ve been plagued by his lies about his 2020 election loss (rigged!) and his other endless bleats of nonsense.

Which brings us back to Epstein, because, supposedly, the files would prove the QAnon theory that various Democrats and liberal celebrities conspired with Epstein to run a pedophile ring that used and abused underage girls. Last year, when Trump was asked by an interviewer whether he’d release the Epstein files, he replied “Yeah, I would.” And in 2023, son Don Junior fumed on social media, “Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scumbags?”

Why indeed.

Feel free to speculate that Trump himself is listed as one of the scumbags. He told New York magazine back in 2002 that “Jeff,” his buddy of 15 years, is “a terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.”

The problem, when you lie about everything, is that nothing means anything. Jeff the “terrific guy” has now been flushed down the Orwellian memory hole. The new message, per Trump’s social media decree, is that Epstein is “a creep” and that everyone should “STOP TALKING ABOUT EPSTEIN!!!!!” Epstein is “somebody that nobody cares about,” despite everyone in Trump’s orbit caring a great deal until Trump summarily decided to pull a 180.

And he can’t even keep his lies straight. On the one hand, he’s now saying there are no Epstein files at all; on the other hand, he’s saying that the Epstein files do exist, that the files are “Radical Left-inspired,” and that they were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” That lie is particularly funny (to borrow a phrase from Keith Richards, it warrants “legs in the air laughter”), because none of those alleged authors were in office in 2018 when a Miami Herald report — citing more than 80 underage victims — triggered the federal probe that put Epstein in jail.

I dearly hope this Epstein flap has “legs,” that it mutates further at Trump’s expense and seriously undercuts his base support, because, frankly, that’s the only way we’ll get a shaft of sunlight in these dark times. Trump and his nuts deserve each other, and it would be popcorn entertainment indeed to watch MAGA tear itself asunder.

Which brings to mind another line from Shakespeare: “The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue!”

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia.