Move Over, Epstein Files – Here’s the Next Thing That Will Spark MAGA Rage

President Donald Trump has been dealing with rage and disappointment from his supporters over the Epstein files — or, more accurately, his failure to produce them — over the past few days with no end in sight. The White House has offered word-parsing explanations, dodged reporters’ questions, and tried to change the subject. But even if the Trump administration is able to soothe the ruffled feathers of those who expected to gawk at a list of powerful pedophiles, there’s already another outrage waiting in the wings.

Years of conspiracy-infused accusations about Jeffrey Epstein’s purported client list and other damaging information he and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell supposedly knew about rich and influential men — fueled by promises from people now in very high positions in the Trump administration — drove MAGA anticipation to a fever pitch. Accusations about whose names might be in the hypothetical “Epstein files” have even featured prominently in multiple internecine MAGA civil wars, mostly fought on social media.

Many of Trump’s most ardent supporters expected the Epstein files to be released on his inauguration day or shortly thereafter. But then January ended and rolled into February, the year is more than half over, and now the DOJ says there is no list — despite Attorney General Pam Bondi saying on Fox News back in February that it was “sitting on my desk right now.”

Various MAGA world denizens have sought to spin new webs of conspiracies to explain why the Trump administration might not have released the Epstein list they’re so sure exists, but others have already figured out their next tin foil hat to don.

The trendsetting tweeters and YouTubers are pointing to another conspiratorial accusation about government-held secrets to keep the MAGA faithful sufficiently riled up — Fort Knox.

The United States Bullion Depository in Kentucky, commonly referred to by the name of the Army post right next door, is where a significant portion of the United States’ gold reserve is kept, along with other valuable coins, artifacts, and historical documents belonging to the federal government.

According to the U.S. Mint’s website, the depository currently holds 147.3 million ounces of gold, which is “[a]bout half” of the stored gold for the U.S. Treasury and other federal agencies.

Protecting hundreds of billions of dollars of gold means access to the vault is limited and no visitors are permitted. Most information about the vault is under extremely strict protections, with many security measures classified. Among the ones that are known are a 100-hour time lock and separate combination codes known only to different depository staff members needed to open the vault.

There have been only three known occasions when people outside the Treasury Department have been able to visit and inspect the vault. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first in 1943, then a group of journalists and members of Congress conducted an inspection in 1974, and the third was in 2017, when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin accompanied Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and a small group of other government officials and staff.

The 1974 visit was sparked by a conspiracy theory, promoted in a book at the time and amplified by tabloid newspapers, that powerful figures had secretly accessed Fort Knox and emptied its vault.

The gold was fine, as it was during the 2017 trip — with a Trump-appointed Treasury Secretary heading up the tour, nonetheless.

That hasn’t stopped online provocateurs from again claiming that the “Deep State” or foreign adversaries or some other sort of shadowy group of people had managed to breach the secure facility and stolen some or all of the gold.

In February, Elon Musk said he wanted his DOGE team to “investigate” Fort Knox, and tweeted that it would be “cool to do a live video walkthrough.”

Musk posted his personal musings about whether the gold had been stolen. “Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not,” he wrote, arguing that the American people “want to know if it’s still there.”

Trump ran with it a few days later while chatting with reporters on Air Force One, saying “we’re going to go to Fort Knox and make sure the gold is still there.”

But like other grand DOGE ambitions that fell short of what was promised, thus far a Fort Knox audit has not happened. (The Treasury Department does conduct its own private classified audit annually, but that isn’t what the “audit Fort Knox!” supporters are clamoring for.)

So it’s perhaps not surprising that amid the grumbling about the Epstein files flop, Fort Knox chatter started heating up in online MAGA conversations, with some posts about an audit of the gold reaching viral numbers this week.

The below tweet, for example, has over 6.3 million views as of Wednesday morning.

A number of people have theorized that the fact an audit had not happened yet this year meant the gold was gone, as well as made references to the Epstein files situation. A selection of tweets is below.

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