Behind Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Problem
Donald Trump’s political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the president seriously, but not literally. However, the people who take the most Trump literally appear among his own supporters who, over the years, have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled by the truth: that Hillary Clinton and Various Bideens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020 elections were stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of billionaire Jeffrey Epein guaranteed “a complete investigation” could have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely make the request for a request for a request. So Earlier This Month, when the Department of Justice and the FBI Issued A Stamenting that there was, in fact, no depeper Mystery Behind Epstein’s Death –Which Occurred in Manhattan Jail Cell in 2019, As He was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging White House Likely Assomed that the MagaPours was simply going to move on, as there were so many times before. The surprise – who, two weeks later, has still not been able to repress himself – is that this is not the case.
Toring himself, the president tried to reject the tumult (“Do people always speak of this type?”) And to blame him, in a way, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the “new scam” of the Democrats). More unexpectedly, he called those of his own base who asked for more complete “weak” and “stupid” accounts, unfolding that “my past supporters adhered to this” bullshit “, hook, line and lead”. But it was only blood in the water, both for the Democrats who now call for the complete release of Epstein files and anonymous republican strategists that have started to warn of a drop in the rate of participation in mid-term.
Among Trump’s aid, a theory was that his team had made an error by promising not only vibrations and innuendo, as he normally does, but something to which he is generally allergic: tangible evidence. The details of Epstein’s life – the formidable relationships he cultivated between the political, financial and academic elites; His conviction in Florida in 2008 for solicitation of prostitution; The way he avoided a more serious punishment – was compared to exhaustively. But the Maga The fixing was that the government had participated in concealment and had a list of Epstein customers in its possession, which could, the theory was going to involve scores of the powerful odious crimes. Last October, Trump’s running mate JD Vance said: “Seriously, we have to release Epstein’s list.” In February, the prosecutor General Pam Bondi answered the question of whether the Ministry of Justice would soon make the “list of customers of Jeffrey Epstein” by saying that he was “sitting on my desk at the moment to revise”. Fifteen right -wing influencers had gone to the White House and received binders entitled “Epstein files: phase one”. But these “files” offered nothing new.
For Trump’s allies in the right -wing media, many of whom predicted spectacular revelations on Epstein for years, it looked like a dodge. “The fact that the American government, the one I voted, refused to take my question seriously and said instead:” Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist “was too much for me,” said Tucker Carlson. Megyn Kelly posted on X that there were only two possibilities: that there was no list of customers and that Bondi had induced the public misleading or that there is a scandal which is covered and it is his “- Trump’s-” Direction “. Steve Bannon estimated that the counterpoup cost would cost the Republicans forty seats in the House of Representatives next year. literally.
More interesting was the reaction among Trump’s most recent allies: the billionaires of the Silicon Valley and the Podcast Bros who were the key to his victory in 2024. Elon Musk made joyful charges against Trump for weeks. The actor and podcaster Andrew Schulz complained: “He is exactly the opposite of everything I voted.” Joe Rogan, among Trump’s most important allies in November, now seemed betrayed: “Why do they say that there were thousands of hours of horrible shit tapes? Why do they say that?”
Trump is vulnerable to the Epstein case, and not only because the two men were photographed by partying together, or because Trump congratulated Epstein in a quote that was widely broadcast, or because Epstein had told journalist Michael Wolff that, for ten years, he had been the closest friend of the president. ” Wall Street Journal reported that for the fiftieth anniversary of Epstein, Trump, among others, sent him a “debauchery” birthday letter, which Trump denied, saying that he would continue the Newspaper“Just as I continued everyone.” The Liberals, taking all this, could suspect that it is a simple co -pump for the political choices of Trump: if you build an audience on the Internet, you can become indebted to his obsessions. But the tumult is also linked to how the Trump movement has evolved.
In the post-pandemic atmosphere of fury and distrust, Trump has moved much more agile than democrats to extend his support among people who are only irregularly interested in politics, and he has reached a young, non-white, male group and less likely to have a university diploma. This group, and the podcasters they provide with an audience, seemed attracted to Trump’s personality as a foreigner, an invented against the establishment. And yet, during the six months which followed the inauguration, what Trump, despite the adoption of a cruel and autocratic style, gave them are policies of republican establishment: a budget that reduces Medicaid, stripping seventeen million people of health insurance, and gives enormous tax alternatives to the rich; Military intervention in the Middle East. A CNN survey published on Wednesday suggests that the number of Americans who “strongly approve” from the presidency of Trump – a measure of his base – is now at his point in his first and second terms.
No wonder Trump seems so exasperated. (Thursday, he said that Bondi would “all” produce testimonies from the Grand Jury of the Epstein case, although this does not seem to satisfy anyone.) The central illusion of his political career was that, despite his wealth and his obvious weight, he remains a stranger. But it was always a fiction, and now – with the direction of the unified gop behind him and the Supreme Court mainly supporting him – he can feel strong enough to leave a certain strangeness of his movement. Trump in the second term no longer acts as a populist, and the Epstein affair takes place as a test of the way in which Maga responds to this news. ♦
