Epstein Is the Only Thing That Could Turn Trump’s Base Against Him

A protester holds a sign related to the release of the Jeffrey Epstein development files outside the Capitol in Washington D C on Nov Photo Saul Loeb AFP via Getty Images It s hard to imagine a worse moment for Donald Trump to be caught in the Epstein dragnet than at the tail end of the longest governing body shutdown in U S history with food benefits rattled affordability on everyone s minds and his own voters starting to wonder if the guy in the red tie is really on their side On the same day Trump decisively signed a bill to reopen the cabinet after days of chaos a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans dropped a tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails that punches holes straight through the president s diligently curated story about a distant long-ago acquaintance with Epstein alleging Trump knew about the girls and spent hours at my house with one of the casualties While the messages don t show criminal conduct by Trump they landed at a moment when Americans are already furious with his handling of Epstein s files the shutdown and the basic question of whether their authorities works for the powerful or for everyone else Together they form a pincer around a president who keeps promising transparency and law and order then flinching the second those promises threaten him personally The Dog That Hasn t Barked The new emails came from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena and were circulated by the House Oversight Committee In one April exchange Epstein tells Ghislaine Maxwell his associate who is currently serving a -year sentence for sex trafficking that the dog that hasn t barked is trump adding that a trafficking victim spent hours at my house with him yet he has never once been mentioned Maxwell replies that she has been thinking about that In another email from January Epstein writes to author Michael Wolff about Mar-a-Lago Trump disclosed he requested me to resign never a member ever Of curriculum he knew about the girls as he inquired ghislaine to stop A third exchange from December shows Wolff and Epstein gaming out how Trump should respond to questions from CNN about their relationship with Wolff advising Epstein to let him hang himself if Trump says he hasn t been on the plane or to the house because that would give Epstein PR and political currency over him The emails cut against Trump s own narrative that he barely knew Epstein The more than documents do not contain the storied client list the internet and Trump s own supporters have been clamoring for and none of the publicly published civil matter records accuse Trump But the emails do something almost as politically toxic They cut against Trump s own narrative that he barely knew Epstein and that he had no meaningful insight into what Epstein had done Related Epstein Gave NY Times Journalist Tips About Trump Why Did They Never Get Released The White House is already calling the messages a fake narrative stitched together by partisan Democrats and pointing out that key accuser Virginia Giuffre who died by suicide earlier this year repeatedly announced she never saw Trump engage in wrongdoing Trump himself has also repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein s crimes Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of selectively redacting her name to make the emails look worse But the specific denials aren t the point anymore the point is that the president now looks like he has something to hide about his role in a story where a large number of Americans are already inclined to believe there was a cover-up America Wants the Files Community opinion on this issue is not subtle Polling in early October identified that about three-quarters of Americans want all Epstein-related files issued with only percent saying no documents should be made citizens A Reuters Ipsos survey in July went even further percent of respondents stated they believe Trump s administration is hiding details about Epstein s clients just percent explained it isn t Only percent approved of Trump s handling of the event his worst figure on any issue in that poll Even among Republicans the president was underwater This isn t a niche left-wing obsession A July Economist YouGov poll detected that views on the need for transparency in the Epstein review cut across partisan lines even as Trump s overall job approval slid to a net negative of points PBS s own write-up notes that assistance for releasing the files includes majorities of Republicans and independents The long algebra cut short Americans might be OK with all manner of Trump impropriety but you lose them when a disgraced billionaire pedophile enters the fray Related QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage com For years Republicans have built their identity around a moral panic of their own design branding political opponents as groomers painting LGBTQ people as threats to children and accusing anyone outside their tribe of abetting pedophilia They ve cast themselves as the last line of defense against child trafficking stoking a base that s become genuinely animated by fantasies of a global cabal preying on kids That s why the Epstein revelations land like an airburst not because the conspiracy is real in the way they imagine it but because it punctures the mythology they ve wrapped themselves in exposing the rot inside the movement that contends to be protecting America s children The Epstein emails hit and suddenly the MAGA universe isn t marching in lockstep Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene went online and tore into Trump for how hard he s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out a line you only write when something in the foundation has shifted She followed it by saying her loyalty is to God and her voters first a subtle mutiny but a mutiny all the same That s the backdrop for the House push to force the issue Reps Ro Khanna D-Calif and Thomas Massie R-Ky and dozens of bipartisan co-sponsors have been pushing regulation that would compel the Justice Department to publish its Epstein records building on earlier efforts from Florida Democrats who chased these documents during the Biden years On Wednesday night the House forced Speaker Mike Johnson s hand with an arcane rules maneuver that in the end made him schedule a vote on releasing the records for next week over objections from House Republicans and the White House That measure is likely to pass the House but would face a much tougher road through the Senate However should it pass the Senate it would force a showdown in which Trump could either sign that bill and live with whatever comes out or veto it and tell an already suspicious society that he personally stopped the truth from seeing daylight A Credibility Situation If that were the only fire burning the White House might be able to ride it out It isn t The email release landed in the final days of a -day shutdown that shuttered much of the federal regime and froze Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Project payments for roughly million people the first time in modern history SNAP funding was allowed to lapse during a shutdown Federal judges twice ordered the administration to restore full benefits the Supreme Court granted Trump s crisis appeal and temporarily blocked one of those orders leaving families in limbo while states scrambled to cover the gap Related Insurgent Democratic Candidates Are Ready to Run on Shutdown Betrayal Procedures analysts and state attorneys general pointed out that the Department of Agriculture has billions in contingency reserves and other crisis accounts precisely for situations like this and that the administration could have used them to keep food assistance flowing Instead the White House chose a monthslong tournament of chicken over robustness care tax credits while airports backed up disability beneficiaries rationed groceries and parents fielded notices that their EBT cards would go dry And while the GOP shutdown gambit paid off for the Republicans in the short term plenty of Americans blamed them as the source of their pain America s affordability crises has arrived and Trump is on the hook A new AP NORC poll disclosed this week detected only percent of adults approve of Trump s overall performance and just about a third approve of his handling of the economic activity vitality care or the federal leadership The greater part dangerous for Trump the erosion of his establishment is eventually showing up and the call is coming from inside the house That same poll located his declining approval rating was mostly driven by Republicans with their approval for his management of the federal governing body falling from percent in March to percent now Ask voters what in fact matters to them and they point first to the economic activity and affordability Three-quarters say the market is very essential to their vote majorities say the same about threats to democracy immigration and housing costs Trump is underwater on almost all of it So when new emails emerge suggesting that he has not advised the whole story about his relationship with a convicted child sex trafficker just as his choices have people lining up at food banks that story doesn t land in a vacuum It lands in a country that already subjects the president is looking out for himself first A Pincer of His Own Making The looming House vote on Epstein transparency turns that suspicion into a structural challenge On one flank Trump faces a broad electorate that overwhelmingly wants every unclassified Epstein record published and already believes his administration is hiding the worst of it On the other he faces a Congress that for once is being nudged toward genuine oversight by a coalition that runs from progressive Democrats to libertarian Republicans If the bill passes the Senate and Trump signs it he loses control of the documents and the narrative entirely The Justice Department has already admitted it is sitting on tens of thousands of pages of records beyond what civil suits and Maxwell s trial exposed and has so far produced only a fraction of what congressional subpoenas demand Nobody in the White House can guarantee that there isn t another dog that hasn t barked email buried somewhere in that pile Related Trump Helps Alleged Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Cross Perimeter Into U S Veto the bill and the president becomes the single bulk visible obstacle to telling Epstein s casualties and the society the full story He would be doing it after a shutdown that left poor and disabled Americans wondering how they were going to eat and after months of promising that his second term would conclusively bring accountability for elites who prey on children Either way the myth Trump sold to his base that he was the one man willing to expose the secrets of the powerful is collapsing in real time In poll after poll people say they think he is protecting somebody Increasingly they have to ask whether that somebody is himself The Wrong Time to Blink You can feel Republicans straining to square the circle On Capitol Hill they accuse Democrats of weaponizing the emails while insisting they too assistance full transparency eventually after careful redactions and more closed-door review In conservative media certain MAGA dynamos have raged that the Epstein focus is a liberal distraction from real issues like inflation even as their own viewers tell pollsters that grocery prices and rent are exactly why they re so angry at the shutdown and at Trump s financial market With full awareness of that dissonance the administration is now sprinting toward an economic message it hopes can drown out the rest Trump has reportedly ramped up his expedition schedule darting through swing states in a rushed attempt to smother the Epstein fallout under the safer storyline of economic revival The White House may frame it as a shoring up of constituency but it looks more like damage control factory visits small-business roundtables and grocery store photo ops meant to convince voters the economic activity is better than it feels But no amount of tour gloss can obscure the deeper habit Americans are starting to recognize A president who promised to smash corrupt systems has instead opted its to starve his poorest citizens during a manufactured emergency and slow-walk the truth about one of the the greater part notorious predators of our time It s the same reflex Use state power to protect the powerful then gaslight the general about who is really to blame The House and Senate may be about to force him to choose Release the files and gamble that whatever is in there won t destroy him or veto transparency and decisively make clear that the swamp he promised to drain was never meant to include the likes of Jeffrey Epstein or that he s a creature of the swamp himself The post Epstein Is the Only Thing That Could Turn Trump s Base Against Him appeared first on The Intercept