Trump "knew about the girls". What does MAGA do now?
MAGA's ability to avoid difficult topics will not suffice
House Democrats have just released parts of the “Epstein files” which explicitly tie Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein:
House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Mr. Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged.
Mr. Trump has emphatically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. He has said that he and Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, were once friendly but had a falling out.
But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said the emails, which they selected from thousands of pages of documents received by their panel, raised new questions about the relationship between the two men. In one of the messages, Mr. Epstein flatly asserted that Mr. Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. In another, Mr. Epstein pondered how to address questions from the news media about their relationship as Mr. Trump was becoming a national political figure.
This is an enormous story. These files are excerpts of private communications between Epstein and other figures, some many years old. He had no incentive to lie in them. And he says that Trump “knew about the girls” and spent hours with one victim.
More releases are reportedly coming.
On one level, these documents are not surprising. It took a herculean effort to believe that despite knowing Epstein for years and himself having bragged about committing sexual assault and being found to be a rapist by a New York court, Trump somehow was completely unaware of Epstein’s crimes and had never been on the scene of one.
Yet this herculean effort is precisely what Republicans managed to pull off earlier this year during their brief civil war about Trump’s refusal to fully release the Epstein files. The White House’s attempt to suppress the documents transgressed a key MAGA narrative: that shady and perverted liberal elites had been raping girls and Trump was going to be the person to finally impose accountability. But even as they tried to process his betrayal, a giant and unasked question floated above the whole charade. Why wouldn’t he just release the files?
The answer, of course, was obvious. It was because they would make him look bad. But in an attempt to avoid staring that conclusion in the face, MAGA commentators lit into other members of the regime, like Attorney General Pam Bondi. Anything to avoid questioning Trump himself.
One of the great and under-appreciated strengths of conservative media and the wider MAGA information sphere is the extent to which it just totally fails to talk about issues that cause trouble for Republicans. To take one example, Trump has not been nearly as aggressive in attempting to limit access to abortion as many Christian conservatives would wish. But rather than doing stories about that and hence deepening the tensions and fractures within the conservative movement, outlets like Fox News just don’t talk about the issue at all.
And so it went with Trump’s links to Epstein. In fact, it’s still going on right now. Hours after House Democrats released the documents, the front page of Fox News currently does not mention the word “Epstein”. Instead it’s focused on more important things:
But this is not the sort of story that can be contained through redirection. This - a series of emails which tie the president of the United States to a rapist and child sex trafficker - is one of the biggest stories of the decade. He “knew about the girls”, just like we always suspected he did.
What happens next? There’s a chance that MAGA tries to close ranks and brush all of this away. I don’t think that’s going to work. It might be possible to scare elite Republicans into stopping asking questions about it, but damage in the eyes of Epstein-motivated voters will be impossible to avoid. And among the ranks of Republican elites themselves, the one to watch will be Marjorie Taylor Green, who has become one of the most prominent MAGA dissenters but thus far tried to avoid skewering Trump himself too sharply. Will that change? Thus far, she’s yet to tweet about the reports.
Finally, is this another indication that Democrats are… finally good at politics again? After Democrats landed a series of blows on Republicans over the last few weeks, the news cycle was nevertheless starting to return to “Democrats in disarray” over the chaotic end to the party’s shutdown of the federal government. But now Democrats have flipped the narrative again, sweeping away a bad news week for themselves and replacing it with something toxic for the GOP. And more is apparently coming.