President Trump and MAGA seemed indestructible — until the Epstein Files.
And it’s a mess of Trump’s own making.
How humiliating for Trump to have MAGA in revolt, to have House Republicans voting near-unanimously with Democrats to release the files.
Of course, Trump could order his own Department of Justice to do it himself. That he won’t is, at best, curious. At worst, he’s swallowed the suicide pill and is witnessing the destruction of his own political movement, meant to reshape the GOP for generations to come.
If Trump has nothing to hide, what’s the problem? Why not order the release forcefully, unilaterally and enthusiastically?
Why get pushed into a corner by his own party, now convulsing itself not just over the Epstein Files but in full disarray since the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
It’s a critical time for the GOP. One half of MAGA has flung itself into the realm of anti-Israel, misogynistic, white supremacist conspiracy theories, with the odious Nick Fuentes interviewed — sans pushback — by Tucker Carlson.
Fuentes, by the way, has yet to be fully denounced by Trump, which is another huge unforced error.
How humiliating for Trump to have MAGA in revolt, to have House Republicans voting near-unanimously with the Democrats to release the files.
But if Trump has nothing to hide, what’s the problem? Why not order the release forcefully, unilaterally and enthusiastically?
When Trump won’t reject the noxious ideas of a Nick Fuentes, when he won’t explain why Epstein’s procurer Ghislaine Maxwell got turfed to a cushy Club Fed, when he won’t refute Diddy’s reported claims from behind bars that the president is planning to pardon him — well, Trump’s just fueling the notion that he’s got something to hide.
To be clear: if Trump wants to cement his legacy, he cannot pardon either Maxwell or Diddy.
Note how quiet JD Vance is. He’s planning to run for president as a sane Republican. He’s not getting drawn into this sewage spill.
Nor is Melania or Ivanka. Not a peep.
Trump’s name appears in three Epstein-related emails released last week by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
Imagine if this had been Joe Biden, named during his own presidency. Republicans and right-leaning media would be outraged, rightfully so.
Trump is usually savvier than this. What gives?
His argument last week wasn’t convincing — at all.
‘The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents, in order to deflect from all their bad policies and losses,’ he wrote on Truth Social last Friday.
‘Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s [sic] problem, not the Republican’s [sic] problem!’
Trump couldn’t have been more wrong. Epstein is very much MAGA’s problem – and Trump’s.
When the GOP and the Dems are on the same side during a Trump administration, well, the president is in real trouble.
Remember: Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files.
In June 2024, just five months before the election, he was asked by Fox News: ‘Would you declassify the Epstein files?’
Trump: ‘Yeah, yeah, I would.’
Cut to last week, Trump angrily blaming the Democrats as onetime MAGA loyalists Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace publicly broke with the president.
Greene doubled down on Sunday, telling CNN that she couldn’t understand why Trump was so resistant.
‘The women themselves that I have talked to have over and over again said that Donald Trump did nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what’s in the files. I can’t even guess.’
Last week, Trump angrily blaming the Democrats as onetime MAGA loyalists Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace publicly broke with the president.
It’s a critical time for the GOP. One half of MAGA has flung itself into the realm of anti-Israel, misogynistic, white supremacist conspiracy theories, with the odious Nick Fuentes interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
Why get pushed into a corner by his own party, now convulsing itself not just over the Epstein Files but in full disarray since the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
Mace, herself a survivor of rape, and Boebert have reportedly been contacted by Team Trump to remove their names from a discharge petition that would force the release of the files – though Mace has denied the reports.
‘No one has threatened me,’ Mace told The Independent last Thursday. ‘The president hasn’t threatened me, and the president didn’t ask me to get off the discharge petition.’
Two of those emails released last week were between Epstein and writer Michael Wolff, the latter encouraging the late pedophile to manipulate Trump as he ran for president in 2015.
‘I think you should let him hang himself,’ Wolff wrote in one. ‘If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.’
We also saw a 2011 email from Epstein to Maxwell in which he called Trump ‘the dog that hasn’t barked’ and claimed that Trump spent ‘hours at my house’ with one of Epstein’s victims.
The second email exchange between Epstein and Wolff, this in 2019: ‘Of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.’
Now: Is it possible that Epstein was telling the truth, that Trump knew what Epstein was up to with young girls? Sure. Of course it is.
But it also makes sense that if anyone had evidence of anything untoward, we’d know about it by now. That’s the stuff of election cycle oppo-research dreams.
What seems most likely, in my opinion, is that Trump is looking to protect some very powerful men he may be fond of, or to simply avoid having to answer more questions once the documents are made public.
It’s such a profound miscalculation.
Trump’s recent wins – the return of all living American hostages in Gaza and an end to the Israel-Palestine war – have now been dwarfed by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.
The only person Trump seems to fear is a dead pedophile. It’s a terrible look.
If Trump is smart, he won’t let this get to a vote. He’ll order the release himself, with confidence and brio.
Besides, we all know what’s doubtless going to happen: The document dump will come on a Friday during the holidays, when most newsrooms have skeleton staff, and the pages will be as poorly photocopied, organized and heavily redacted as the JFK files.
Let’s get real. No one else — no one — is going to pay in the case of the People vs. Jeffrey Epstein.
So why not dispense with the political theater, President Trump, and focus on salvaging your legacy?
