Why Trump Can't Make the Epstein Story Kill Itself

Ginned-up mobs don't love nuance!

On Wednesday night, five top Trump officials—Vice President J.D. Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel—reportedly planned to meet at the Vance residence to discuss the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. That meeting was ultimately rescheduled, and according to CNN, Trump advisers are hopeful that the MAGA base's furor over the administration's botched handling of Epstein is dissipating.

That remains to be seen: Thus far, Epstein has been the rare subject where Trump-friendly commentators in alternative media do not automatically take the president's side. Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh, Tim Pool, Andrew Schulz, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others have all criticized the administration's approach.

Yet Trump has proven remarkably adept at grinding down wayward right-wing pundits' willingness to resist him. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot, even staunchly Trump-loyal conservatives leapt to condemn the violence at the Capitol and Trump's role in it. After four years of Trump steadfastly maintaining that he did nothing wrong—and fuming at any Republican who says otherwise—few prominent conservatives are still willing to blame the riot on Trump. If I had to guess, I'd predict the Epstein story will be the same: Eventually, Trump's contention that it's a fake issue planned by the Democratic Party to ensnare him will prevail in the MAGA verse. You'll see the notable conservative podcasters echoing Trump's line about a plot by James Comey and Barack Obama and opposing Democratic politicians' calls to release the files. Just wait.

In the meantime, it's worth keeping in mind two things. First, Trump has actually been remarkably consistent on the Epstein issue. During the 2024 presidential campaign,  Trump maintained that releasing the files was not a particularly high priority and that he was worried about maligning innocent individuals whose names happened to be associated with the disgraced financier and sexual predator. It was Trump's prominent surrogates—Patel, Vance, Dan Bongino, and others—who made rigid commitments to release information on Epstein's alleged clients. And it was Bondi who claimed, after taking office as A.G., that she was in possession of a client list and would be releasing it. It's those people who are being hypocritical about this, not Trump.

Moreover, Trump is not exactly wrong! As independent journalist Michael Tracey has exhaustively documented on his Substack, hyperbolic claims about Epstein's supposed clients are routinely exposed as false: Many of the alleged victims lacked credibility and recanted their accusations. People who are obsessed with the Epstein story don't like hearing this, but while Epstein was undoubtedly a sexual abuser and a creep—and Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated his predatory behavior—there simply isn't compelling evidence of a larger conspiracy involving many other powerful people whose names have been hidden from the public. By some measures, the Epstein story resembles other recent sex-based moral panics, like campus sexual assault and sex-trafficking, in which a kernel of a true idea (i.e., more could be done to stop sexual assault at elite colleges, or poor immigrant women are sometimes forced into compromising sexual situations), is embellished and overdramatized (i.e., campuses are literal hunting grounds, children are constantly being kidnapped and sex-trafficked at airports).

But once you've ginned up a mob, it can be difficult to explain to the mob that the situation isn't as crazy as it seemed, to please chill out, and that there's nothing really to see here. Surely, Trump knows that by now.

This Week on Free Media

I'm joined by Amber Duke to tackle Jim Acosta's appalling AI interview with a Parkland shooting victim, Vinay Prasad's ouster at the Food and Drug Administration, Nancy Pelosi's take on the PELOSI Act, and Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

Worth Watching

OK, I'm really digging (get it?) Donkey Kong Bananza for the Nintendo Switch. It's basically Super Mario Odyssey crossed with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and given a Donkey Kong flavoring. (Though the art and color scheme remind me of Super Mario Sunshine, at least in the early levels.) I mostly dislike the trend toward everything becoming super-duper open-world—I really miss the linear, themed dungeons of earlier Zelda games—but it seems to work well enough here. Plus, the controls are really intuitive, and the game just looks great.

My only minor gripe is that I don't like Donkey Kong's redesign very much.