The MAGA mediasphere has been convulsing with disingenuous skepticism since the release of the depraved birthday greeting heard ’round the world. When Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team leaked the brothers-in-predation message that Donald Trump shared with high-flying pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th birthday, Trump and his movement had stoutly denied the existence of any such communiqué. In a standard move of media intimidation, Trump filed suit against The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, alleging in his complaint that the document was a fabrication.

Now that the document has surfaced—together with the gruesome (if redacted) contents of the 238-page birthday book Maxwell compiled for Epstein—the MAGA messaging complex now contends that Trump’s contribution is a forgery. The reasoning would require that back in 2003, Trump’s far-seeing enemies had planted this false flag in Maxwell’s curated panegyric to her boyfriend/co-procurer in order to mine it for damaging intel 22 years later. It’s the same labored exercise in political demonology that Trump himself pioneered in his evidence-free campaign to suggest that Barack Obama was not a US citizen: In that reverie, cunning deep-state operatives forged Obama’s US birth certificate in 1961, since it was plain as day that a mixed-race newborn was destined to ascend to the presidency 47 years later.

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Yet plausibility is not the point of the counteroffensive here; rather, it is to kick up conspiratorial speculations so that no one discusses the damning nature of this latest twist in the Epstein saga. For this maneuver, the right has a template even more successful than Trump’s birther crusade: the 2004 scandal involving a botched news report on President George W. Bush’s military service. During the height of Bush’s reelection campaign, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Bush’s tour with the Texas Air National Guard; it was common for Texan power players like Bush’s father to arrange for cushy National Guard sinecures for their sons in order to sidestep being drafted into combat duty in Vietnam. Typescript sleuths on the right analyzed the fonts and claimed that the documents used in Rather’s report were post-hoc forgeries.

In the aftermath of the controversy, CBS apologized for the segment and fired four senior news-division employees; several months earlier, the on-air correspondent Dan Rather for the 60 Minutes segment had announced that he was stepping down from his weekday news anchor post for the network. The episode has since served as proof text in the right’s long-running campaign against ostensible liberal media bias, but just as important is the nomenclature here; the scandal was memorialized as “Rathergate,” summoning all the sinister ideological motives the right has been ascribing to TV news readers for more than half a century. Meanwhile, the gist of the segment—that Bush was grounded from flying further missions in the guard after failing to turn up for a mandatory medical exam, and that the whole incident was smoothed over in the public record—jibes with what other reporters have found.

Today’s mainstream media, cursed with the historical consciousness of a goldfish, is already demonstrating that it has learned nothing from these past exercises in conservative-movement intimidation. Indeed, my hometown paper, The Washington Post, has accelerated its descent into MAGA-tipsheet status under the direction of its owner Jeff Bezos with a bogus report from its White House bureau chief Matt Viser, appearing under the headline “No Clear Answers on Whether Trump Signed Epstein Birthday Book.” The piece obligingly platforms the social-media pronouncements of MAGA quislings like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson confidently asserting that Trump’s signature was forged; when Viser stirs himself to talk to Thomas W. Vastrick, an actual authority on signatures, he gets this response:

There’s not anything standing out to me to say it is a forgery, meaning not written by Donald Trump.… It’s very consistent in letter design, slant, and letter height ratios. For someone to say it’s not his handwriting or doesn’t look like his handwriting, I don’t know where they’re coming from. It certainly does have the pictorial evidence of it.

Vastrick does offer the proviso that Trump’s signature could still have been cut and paste, even though there is nothing in the formatting of the greeting suggest that. But never mind: Viser has raised a speculative whiff of controversy, mostly by quoting movement hacks who rely on Trump’s presidency to make a handsome living and a handful of Trump’s retainers in Congress who would declare the sky green at the Great Leader’s behest. Thus does a straightforward piece of evidence billow away into the “who can say?” canons of Vichy newsgathering.

Yet the problem for Trump’s defenders, and his invertebrate media enablers, is that the context in which the greeting appears—the sprawling, sickening Epstein birthday book—offers plenty of clues to indicate that it is Trump’s message. The contributions of Joel Pashcow, a real-estate magnate who was a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, deserve at least as much focus as Trump’s ghastly note to Epstein (where, it should be noted, the president’s signature appears in the pubic region of a sketch of a young female form that could be generously described as at the margins of the age of consent).

In one photo from Pashcow, Epstein is shown on a golf course hoisting a novelty check signed by Trump. (This is an actual instance of cut-and-paste photoshopping, and boy is it obvious.) Underneath, Pashcow scrawled that Epstein had sold Trump a “fully depreciated” woman whose name is redacted here; he jokes that this is an example of “Jeffrey showing early talents with money and women!” What he doesn’t note, but what’s obvious from the context, is that Trump and Epstein were so closely identified as voracious sexual predators that the trafficking of young women would be instantly recognized as fodder for a joke in Epstein’s Caligulan social circle.

Pashcow also included his own doodled tribute to Epstein in the same vein as Trump’s, and even practiced sycophants like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson couldn’t do anything to wish its contents away. An inset drawing shows Epstein handing out lollipops to young girls of elementary-school age under the timestamp of 1983; the larger image shows what are presumably the same grooming subjects servicing Epstein on a beach lounging chair in 2003; a private plane featuring the initials “JE” on its side appears in the background, signifying Epstein’s “Lolita Express” plane. In the background is a redtile-roofed mansion that bears a closer resemblance to Mar-a-Lago than to any property of Epstein’s. Under the timestamp, Pashcow wrote “what a great country.”

These days, Pashcow, a Trump and RNC donor, is likely more prone to say he’s dedicated to making the country great again. God knows that Jeff Bezos and Matt Viser are doing all they can to lend aid to the cause.