You’re welcome to join the Resistance in believing that a) the DOJ has proof of the president’s complicity in Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls, b) Democrats declined to produce that evidence when the department was under their control, and c) a Republican administration built for blind servility to an authoritarian boor will dutifully produce it if compelled to do so. I’ll continue to believe that we’re already at or near the high-water mark of political damage to Trump from this scandal and that, if incriminating evidence against him does exist, we’ll never see it.
Why, his “exoneration” is probably in the works as I write this.
But I’ll admit that what happened in the House yesterday was surprising. For the moment, the most interesting thing about Epstein fever in Washington is how uncharacteristic—and poor—the president’s strategy for managing the crisis has been. He has an M.O. that’s worked for him in the past but he isn’t following it this time. Why not?
In plain sight.
Most politicians beset by scandal will deny the truth of the matter. Trump’s M.O. is to admit that it’s true and claim that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Often his corruption will play out in plain sight, as if to coax the public into concluding that what he’s doing can’t be truly scandalous or else he’d try to hide it.
I remember thinking in 2015 that his history of donating to Democrats, especially to Hillary Clinton, would ruin him in the GOP primary among the ideologically puritanical Tea Party right. And it might have—if he had treated it as something to apologize for. He didn’t. “As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” he told the Journal at the time. “As a businessman, I need that.”
To hear him tell it, not donating to Clinton would have been a scandal, proof of disqualifying foolishness by someone who refused to take full advantage of a corrupt system.
Ten years later, the “in plain sight” strategy for crisis management continues to serve him well. His cryptocurrency scam would have been the most comically corrupt thing a president has ever done even if he hadn’t tacked on a presidential meet-and-greet to induce investments. But he did, and he hasn’t suffered an ounce of political pain for it. Why would he? Surely it can’t be bribery if it’s happening out in the open.
There was an obvious “in plain sight” approach he might have taken with the Epstein files. “I’m sure I’m in there,” he could have said. “He and I were friends for years before I found out he was a pervert. And I’ve made a lot of enemies, don’t forget. Some of the people interviewed by the FBI about the case must have used it as an opportunity to smear me.” The friendship between the two men played out in public; Trump could have used that to his advantage the way he usually does by preparing his fans to shrug off the allegations against him.
But he didn’t. Even when he pivoted last week to calling the Epstein files a hoax, his tone was less, “What’s the big deal?” than, “Avert your eyes.” For once, he seems not to trust that his supporters will follow his lead if he plays off scandalous allegations as mundane. Yeah, I once hosted a party for “calendar girls” at which Epstein was the only other guest. So what? That’s not illegal, is it?
I think in this case he’s worried about breaching the containment dome around right-wing opinion.
Meltdown.
Our friend David French has made the point repeatedly that politically engaged people don’t realize how little the average red-state joe has heard about the president’s scandals.
We all understand that MAGA media is propaganda that’s designed to shield Republicans from information that might reflect badly on Donald Trump. But we don’t appreciate how tight the seal is, says David. There may be millions of right-wingers who still don’t know, in 2025, that their hero was good buddies with the predator Jeffrey Epstein.
That in itself might not have been an insurmountable PR problem for Trump if Epstein were an obscure figure. In that case, the president could have followed the “in plain sight” strategy to shape right-wing opinion by shrugging off their friendship as old news, much ado about nothing. As it is, Trump’s supporters have formed some very firm opinions about why Jeffrey Epstein’s wealthy associates were keen to associate with him—for which, ironically, we have years of demagogic MAGA media to thank.
So Trump’s best play, until now, has been to avoid the subject. Better to preserve the containment dome and keep many fans ignorant of his long relationship with Epstein than risk breaching it by playing it off as no big deal and awakening them to the fact that there was a relationship in the first place. Which, not coincidentally, also explains why the DOJ tried to close the case without fanfare.
In hindsight, that was a grave mistake. Belief in a grand child-molesting conspiracy by elites is part of the nuclear core of febrile populism, and trying to shut down the reactor has now caused something of a meltdown. If Trump’s fans succeed in forcing the Justice Department to reveal what it knows, many will be shocked to learn that Donald Trump is in the files. MAGA devotees will be forced to choose between abandoning their suspicions about Epstein’s inner circle for the sake of exculpating the president or abandoning the president for the sake of preserving their suspicions about Epstein’s inner circle.
The containment dome will be breached. Republicans in Washington from Trump on down haven’t the faintest idea what to do.
Hot potato.
On Wednesday, with support from three GOP members, a House Oversight subcommittee voted to subpoena the DOJ’s Epstein files.
For days, Democrats had been trying to force votes pertaining to the Epstein case in various committee meetings only to have panicky Republicans shut down legislative business rather than let those votes proceed. The Rules Committee halted work on two immigration bills to prevent the minority from trying to attach Epstein-related amendments to them. When the Committee on Education and Workforce faced the tactic, Republicans pulled a bill related to (of all things) human trafficking so that the amendments on Epstein wouldn’t be taken up.
The House GOP has been paralyzed, not knowing whether the safe play politically is to side with Democrats by demanding the documents and risk being accused of disloyalty to Trump or to side with Trump in opposing disclosure and risk being accused of complicity in a sex-trafficking conspiracy. At a moment like that, members desperately needed guidance from their leaders.
But their leaders have no idea what to do either.
Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home early for the August recess rather than take a position on whether to support or oppose releasing the files. “There’s a lot of frustration,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN of Johnson. “We don’t want to be adversarial with the president … but eventually you gotta call a play.”
Usually Trump can be counted on to ride herd on wavering Republicans by threatening them to do what he wants—or else—but he’s lying low too. Reportedly when Republican members of the Rules Committee visited the White House on Tuesday, they were ushered into the Oval Office and prepared to be dressed down for handling the Epstein kerfuffle badly. Instead the president let them observe trade negotiations, and then gave them “challenge coins” as souvenirs. “Senior House Republicans have … been irritated that the White House hadn’t offered much in terms of back-up” on the crisis, Politico alleged.
Trump, Johnson, and the various Republican-led committees are all playing “hot potato,” it appears, each seemingly hoping that one of the others will step up and chart the party’s course in a no-win situation. (The speaker has his fingers crossed that the courts will resolve the matter next month, true to cowardly form for a GOP legislator in 2025.) On Wednesday that lack of direction came to a head in the Oversight Committee: Without anyone from above dictating what they should do, Republicans Brian Jack, Scott Perry, and Nancy Mace voted in favor of issuing a subpoena.
The containment dome is about to be breached. “The revolt of House Republicans who favored releasing Epstein case documents surprised White House officials and multiple members of GOP leadership,” Politico reported. “Trump officials in particular, who are used to House Republicans rolling over to the president’s every whim, were especially stunned at the increasingly public and blunt pushback.”
It figures that the first real congressional rebellion of Trump’s second term would be triggered not by nominating political henchmen to the federal bench or sending immigrants to foreign dungeons without due process but by a conspiracy theory that the president’s own Justice Department says isn’t borne out by the evidence on hand.
Now here we are. What happens to the president’s support when the containment dome about his relationship with Epstein crumbles?
The great disappointment.
Not much, I suspect—although the fact that he’s palpably worried about what might be in the files is the strongest evidence I’ve seen that they contain something truly damaging. “They’re going to accuse me of some funny business,” he reportedly warned recently in the Oval Office. He’s innocent, he stressed, but “they’re going to f— me anyways.”
Republican voters aren’t going to turn on him over allegations of “funny business” after 10 years of ignoring every other allegation of “funny business.” Not even when, as in this case, they happen to come from a source in which those voters have vested an unusual amount of credibility.
That’s because populists don’t really care about punishing Epstein’s accomplices. They care about punishing Democrats. They’re interested in exposing the sordid sexual crimes of the ruling class because they’ve convinced themselves that “ruling class” is synonymous with “rich liberals.” If the Epstein files turned out to incriminate a bunch of Trump-crony Republicans, the right’s true believers would swing around behind the president’s “hoax” theory of the evidence instantly.
Their interest in the subject begins and ends with being able to use it as a heavy moral bludgeon against Democrats. They won’t use it against Trump because they’re not going to saddle themselves with spending the next three and a half years supporting a gravely wounded, scandalized president. They’ll make the necessary moral compromises to exculpate him, as they always do.
Even if they didn’t, I’m not sure why the president would care. His job approval could drop to 20 percent and nothing much would change. He’s already passed the one piece of legislation he cares about. He can do, or try to do, everything else on his policy wish list via executive order. And as I explained a few days ago, he won’t be ousted from office no matter how unpopular he becomes. So long as he commands enough right-wing support to credibly threaten GOP lawmakers with primary challenges, he’s safe.
At worst, a wounded Trump might struggle to get Senate Republicans to support future nominees, but even that’s overstated. If a vacancy opened on the Supreme Court and he pushed some MAGA toady like Emil Bove to fill it, populists would seize that as an excuse to forgive and forget about Epstein and rally behind him. His sleaziness might become an argument in favor of confirming Bove, in fact: Filling the judiciary with lickspittles is the whole reason to continue supporting a figure as compromised as Trump, right-wing influencers would say.
The real risk to the president from being named in the Epstein files isn’t that Republicans will conclude he’s a pedophile. It’s that his inclusion will force them to extend some benefit of the doubt to Democrats mentioned in the files whom they were eager to demagogue.
That’s another “great disappointment” lurking in this episode for populists. The first was the DOJ informing them that the conspiracy they’d expected to find in the Epstein evidence wasn’t there. The second will occur when the files are opened and numerous liberals are mentioned—alongside Donald J. Trump. Populists will no longer be able to presume that everyone named in the documents is guilty, as they were hoping to do. Trump’s involvement will force them to make feeble arguments about why the witnesses who implicated the president were merely rumor-mongering whereas the witnesses who implicated, say, Bill Clinton should certainly be believed. Calls for prosecuting Democratic evildoers will be met with, “Why not Trump?”
Having the president in the files, in other words, means MAGA won’t get the clean “win” it was hoping for over left-wing perverts and the “deep state” that supposedly serves them. Once the containment dome is breached, the Epstein conspiracy becomes a bipartisan scandal at the highest level—which means it’s barely a scandal at all. Right-wing fantasies of purging America of its predatory liberal establishment will be dashed. And it’ll be Trump’s fault.
