Since his arrest on September 16, the twists and turns of the Sean Combs (aka Diddy) affair have been widely bandied about among Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) supporters. Between an all-out smear campaign against Kamala Harris and, among the most radical, convictions of the existence of satanist pedophile networks, accusations of complicity targeting the Democratic candidate are multiplying.

While Trump has himself relayed the insinuations that presented his opponent as a “client” of the singer-producer Combs, several Harris supporters have expressed their anger at the rumors. This political sequence of rare violence is the latest of the defamatory attacks, often devoid of the slightest proof, made by the Trump camp against its political opponents for the past eight years.

The groundwork laid by ‘Pizzagate’ and the Epstein affair

In the fall of 2016, amid the US election campaign, an urban myth born of far-right internet forums accused high-ranking members of the Democratic Party of indulging in satanic pedophile orgies in the basement of a Washington pizzeria. Although fabricated from start to finish, the Pizzagate stink bomb damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump.

Pizzagate has entered into the vast and frenzied conspiracy mythology centered around the shadowy figure Q and his “QAnon” community, who claim to be helping Trump bring down a satanist pedophile network involving the Democrats, Hollywood and global elites. This sordid fiction was fueled by the real scandal caused by Jeffrey Epstein, the influential financier with his endless address book, who was arrested on July 6, 2019 for sex trafficking and found hanged in his cell a month later, on August 10. The investigation had revealed an organized system of raping teenage girls.

As a result, part of the Trumpist electorate hoped in vain that there would be earth-shattering revelations implicating their Democratic opponents. Nevertheless, after 2020, many Trump supporters compiled video clips of Joe Biden in the presence of little girls, suggesting pedophilic tendencies. His vice president Harris has also been targeted, with AI-generated or doctored images showing her alongside Epstein.

The seeds of political exploitation

The first complaint of rape, violence and sex trafficking was filed against Combs on November 16, 2023. In the months that followed, nearly a dozen others were added, as a picture began to form of an organized system of group sexual violence comparable in scale to the accusations made against Epstein.

But what if Combs has become the new bogeyman in the political arena? In March, when his residences had just been raided, Fox News headlines read that the rap star “has been a prolific supporter of Democrats.” The right-wing channel also emphasized his cordial relations with Barack Obama and his commitment to Joe Biden in 2020, but glossed over his closeness to Trump.

In the summer, other doctored images and videos began to circulate that associated Harris with the rapper. And when she had just succeeded Biden on the campaign trail, a pro-Trump post went viral: “Never forget how Kamala Harris got her start. She’s no stranger to Diddy parties in Los Angeles either,” the account asserted. Yet every time this post appears, the so-called proof shows not a picture of Diddy, but Harris’ ex-boyfriend, the actor Montel Williams, who is also Black.

Insinuations relayed by Trump himself

Since September 16, when Combs was arrested in New York and remanded in custody on charges of sex trafficking and extortion, the Trumpist smear machine has been stepping up its attacks

As early as September 17, The Right to Bear Memes, a humorous pro-Trump humor account on X, posted a doctored version of a photo taken of Williams in 2001 at a charity event. It is a crude photomontage, replacing Williams’ head with that of P. Diddy. But it prompted the comment “The Diddy Client List goes all the way to the top,” posted by Red Pill USA, a major pro-Trump conspiracy account, and viewed over a million times.

In a now-deleted tweet, Williams, who briefly dated Harris, showed his annoyance at being confused by MAGA activists with Diddy: “Here they go again with ‘all black people look alike…'” But there was little to be done. Other degrading posts, generated by artificial intelligence during the summer, invented a Harris dressed in ultra-sexualized evening wear, as the debauched partner of Combs.

But it is notably the infamous doctored image of Harris with Williams, whose head has been superimposed by Diddy’s, that has been circulating on TruthSocial, the social media platform founded by Trump, with the caption: “Kamala doing the Diddy? Madam vice president, have you ever been involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddies freak offs?” The post was deleted, but later reposted by Trump himself, eliciting ire from the Democratic camp.

In response, the former professional basketball player Rex Chapman, a Harris supporter, shared an assemblage of half a dozen photos showing Trump with Diddy. “Meanwhile  – these are real,” he wrote. And they certainly are – as photo archives attest, the real estate mogul and the rap star often met at charity events. Democratic supporters have not forgotten that, in 2012, Trump called him “a good friend” and “a good guy.”

QAnon conspiracists latch on to the Diddy case

Although the Republican candidate hasn’t repeated his attacks, his conspiracist base hasn’t forgotten about the episode. Once again, a post on the Red Pill USA account asserted that “Diddy and Epstein are the tip of the iceberg,” linking these real criminal cases to a vast conspiracy theory allegedly implicating the CIA.

On Telegram, where the craziest conspiracy theories flourish, the group “The New World Order Conspiracy” claimed that “the world is about to discover through the Diddy case that the Democratic Party is the Deep State,” the name given to the fantasy state that would secretly control the world. Another post gleefully announced that, behind the scenes of the Diddy affair, Trump and his allies have allegedly “infiltrated Hollywood, the music industry and the Black community” to dismantle a “satanist, pedophile and corrupt” network.

While American celebrity media TMZ published archive photos of a 2004 party showing Combs eating fruit placed on a reclining naked woman, a X post viewed three million times suggested that that he may even have performed a human sacrifice ritual to retrieve adrenochrome, a bodily substance that in the QAnon conspiracy myth, is endowed with regenerative virtues. And so it follows that eight years after the phantasmagoric Pizzagate, and five years after Epstein’s arrest, the monster of Trumpist conspiracism has swallowed and digested a new scandalous affair.