Odds are decent that you’ve heard about Donald Trump’s sudden insistence that additional investigative files around famed late pedophile sexual trafficker Jeffrey Epstein do not exist and that he won’t be releasing them, despite having centered much of his political identity and presidential campaign around their release.
By this point, former Trump personal attorney and current Justice Department official Todd Blanche is arranging a meeting with jailed Epstein right hand Ghislaine Maxwell before she can testify under oath in any public forum; Trump ally House Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly ended the congressional session as even some of his GOP colleagues were gearing up for a vote to force the release of records; and Trump himself has started hitting back at his own longtime supporters for caring about his promise to put all the information out there, posting frenetically about the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and the “weaklings” that buy into the claim of conspiracy.
The freakout stems at least in part from the fact that this seems to have become the first issue in a long time, arguably ever, that has really rattled his most sycophantic public supporters and shaken the faith of the MAGA base, not to mention breaking through to even relatively tuned-out people not plugged into politics. Even staunch backers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer are directly confronting the president, who has spent the intervening week trying to talk about anything else. The range of options is limited and the Occam’s Razor explanation has to do with Trump’s own longtime association with Epstein, including a birthday letter he reportedly once wrote to the deceased abuser cryptically referencing “a wonderful secret.” I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that could mean.
Why Trump hasn’t shaken this one off yet
There’s a question here about why now, and why this. My assessment of why this issue specifically is breaking through to such an extent is because of how foundational the elements of the Epstein debacle are to the mythos of the MAGA crowd. It perfectly combines a whole array of their very particular paranoias and obsessions, including the fundamental notion that there is a kind of elite, degenerate cabal that is running society and hiding its many crimes from you, the moral public. The idea of a world awash in pedophilia and constant threat to children is also a core conceit of this ideology, which has warped the otherwise noble notion of protecting kids into a catch-all weapon against every perceived enemy, ranging from trans people to liberal politicians to schoolteachers.
There’s also the fact that Trump doesn’t really have anyone to hide behind when it comes to disclosure of the Epstein files. As elements of his agenda have run up against the reality of a political system that, while battered, can still place some limits on Trump‘s raw exercise of power, he can turn around and blame liberal judges or recalcitrant legislators or fellow international leaders for his inability to deliver. If his misguided tariffs and economic policies have predictably not led to a big decline and prices or a resurgence of American manufacturing, it’s not his fault but the work of the shadowy forces arrayed against him, which is yet another through-line of the conspiratorial doctrine of the MAGA faithful.
In this instance, however, there’s no one left to point the finger at. Nothing legally seems to be constraining Trump‘s ability to release the documents, a relatively simple task that he and his surrogates and acolytes have repeatedly promised to quickly get to once Trump was in office. There’s no fall guy that even remotely makes sense, and so Trump is left with this cocktail of an issue that his supporters care very deeply about with an almost religious fervor and a refusal to do what he promised those supporters in a way that cannot be offloaded or blamed on anyone else. He, individually, could order the release of the files, but has simply chosen not to, which suddenly seems to put him in league with all of the elite wrongdoers that his base so hates.
The edges of MAGA-ism are showing
Still, this might not be the thing that finally sinks Trump. Nothing else has in the last decade of his being in the eye of the nation’s political storms, despite many instances when it seemed like he was cooked. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that there will be some internal MAGA squabbling and fractured relationships for a little while, but everyone will eventually step back into formation and carry on. Still, I think it’s notable that there is, in fact, an upper bound to what Trump can get away with with the full-throated support of his followers — which, as sad as it is to say, I think was a legitimate question. I also don’t particularly expect this to blow over quickly, at least in part because there’s plenty for Democrats to hook onto here and attempt to compel the release of some of these records, plus the disclosures of just how close he was with Epstein just keep coming.
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
There’s an interesting set of related questions here that run along the lines of how exactly Epstein got his social position and legitimacy in the first place. Despite his penchant for wearing Harvard sweatshirts, he never attended, though he maintained connections there long after his first arrest and registration as a sex offender. What really seems to have put him in the orbit of the wealthy and powerful people who would eventually become his clients and, potentially, extortion targets was his job teaching at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan, a hire that remains shrouded in some mystery given that he did not even possess a college degree when he joined the faculty of the elite private school. From there, he jumped to financial firm Bear Stearns and onward to his longer financial career (and, some people think, in intelligence).
There remains a lot of doubt and intrigue about exactly how he amassed his fortune; financial journalists and other insiders don’t remember him as the head of any particularly prolific investment firm nor an especially notable player in the world of high-roller financiers. He was famously adept at charming elite figures and representing himself as a trusted member of the in-group, and it’s really many of the institutions of elite New York City that helped establish him as part of the crowd. Epstein was very much a creature of a certain upper-crust New York, where he returned and was by many reports welcomed even after his 2006 arrest for sex crimes with minors.
To quote the late but immortal George Carlin, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” If there’s been one fixation of the MAGA movement over its 10-year lifespan thus far — and extending to its ideological roots in movements like the Tea Party — it’s this certainty that we’re all being played by sickos, even literal demons, running society and, in every iteration of this theory, preying on children in some fashion. For Trump to now come out and tell these people that they’re idiots and rubes for this wanting to see all the Epstein files is like Trump coming out and announcing that borders are inherently violent and his administration is intending to pursue a policy of unrestrained immigration with special programs for the Global South Refugees. It would be read by his base as just as much of an outright betrayal. This might be the one thing that Teflon Don can’t just wriggle off.
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