Why MAGA can’t move on from the ‘Epstein files’

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” asked the president. “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this.”

For some of the president’s supporters, the fate of the “Epstein files,” evidence that would surely tie the world’s elites to reputation-ending sex crimes, was their first true disappointment. When a reporter tried to ask Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi some of their burning questions — specifically, whether Epstein had ever been an intelligence asset and why a minute of footage from outside his jail was missing — Trump surprised them, suggesting that this wasn’t important anymore.

It wasn’t? Hadn’t Bondi said that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now?” Hadn’t JD Vance promised to “release the Epstein list?” Hadn’t Kash Patel demanded that the deep state “let us know who the pedophiles are?” Yes, they had. The “Epstein files” debacle won’t impede the Trump agenda, but it revealed that the “files” were never actually part of that agenda. It was the first leak in the dreadnought Trump built to win last year, when he managed to run on both his record as president and the theory that he, having been victimized by the intelligence establishment, would bring it down from the inside.

Last summer, I called this the “weird vote,” inverting the insult that Tim Walz liked to hurl at Republicans, to explain that a whole lot of people had “weird” beliefs but only one party was courting them. Matthew Yglesias identified a “crank realignment” that was overall bad for Democrats, and had “eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.”

Democrats are not immune to conspiracy theories, or hoping for some box of files to banish their enemies and win the election. But 10 years of campaigning against Donald Trump, and four years of watching him question the 2020 election, has given them very little tolerance for this stuff. Polls show a decently-sized minority of Democrats believing that something was amiss when Trump won every swing state. Party leaders refuse to indulge them.

The Trump campaign had no problem indulging the faithful. Epstein aside, they’ve gotten more of what they hoped for than the supporters of any recent president. Other Republicans promised to bulldoze the Department of Education, to end affirmative action, and to get rid of rules limiting church involvement in elections. Trump simply did it. That’s one of the reasons that he exerts such total control over his party and its base.

It’s also a reason why the Epstein debacle has been so painful to MAGA voters. Why keep those promises, but not this one? “If God spared President Trump’s life it wasn’t so that America could make money and fix the budget,” wrote Alex Jones, a man who trusted no politician until Trump showed up and made him a believer. “It was to burn down a system that relies on people like Jeffrey Epstein.”

Democrats have had their first fun in weeks with this, creating a bot that will report, every day, that Trump hasn’t released the “Epstein files.” Its avatar is a picture of Trump and Epstein together, a memento of how impossible it was for them to convince the “weird” voter that a man who knew Epstein, and who was president when Epstein killed himself, was not actually running a decade-long undercover operation that would end with the trial of Hillary Clinton.