I think you have it backwards. Trump used beauty pageants to recruit girls for his businesses: 100% known. Epstein later poached those girls, likely after a "massage" at mar a lago. Epstein notably said something about wanting to make his own beauty pageants similar to trump's and saw trump as more amoral than himself.
I don't disagree with the idea silliness is a feature not a bug, however most conspiracies that gain a lot of traction have a hook they use to try to get people in the door. Often that starts as something true-ish even if it is misdirected 180 degrees within the group of conspiracists (see Qanon's pedophile cabals).
There are many regions of the US denser than areas in europe with good transportation. People try to explain away the US system by pointing out a few low density areas and say "see these 3 big empty areas in the center? All these differences are necessary" but its sort of a outlier situation run amok. Most of the US IS comparable to europe or asia and we've once again let ourselves be content with "American Exceptionalism" by another name.
The reality is just the US developed much of its infrastructure (1940s-1960s) with car companies basically calling the shots during that era and a lot of places in the US still are struggling to overcome 60+ years of laws and budgets more or less written by the car manufacturers themselves after their WW2 high where their competitors overseas all got bombed to hell.
Water has too low of potential energy to use as fuel in normal circumstances. The people who say this stuff usually say its patents or a secret method kept secret by car companies and are conspiracy brained.
Realistically probably this originally started as somebody being told about hydrogen fuel cells and people telephoned it into a conspiracy theory.
"Woman of your caliber" and "apologize in person" is too much but honestly this is like 80% of a good approach: direct, short, setup a meeting in person, in public.
I think you have it backwards. Trump used beauty pageants to recruit girls for his businesses: 100% known. Epstein later poached those girls, likely after a "massage" at mar a lago. Epstein notably said something about wanting to make his own beauty pageants similar to trump's and saw trump as more amoral than himself.