Behind Trump's Jeffrey Epstein Problem

The President has tried to blame the Democrats, and, more unexpectedly, he has called those in his base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid.”

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. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020 election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, as he was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging—the White House likely assumed that the magaverse would simply move on, as it had so many times before. The surprise—one that, two weeks in, Trump has still not been able to quell—is that it didn’t.

Squirming, the President has tried to dismiss the uproar (“Are people still talking about this guy?”) and to blame it, somehow, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the Democrats’ “new SCAM”). More unexpectedly, he has called those in his own base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid,” lamenting that “my PAST SUPPORTERS have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.” But that has been just blood in the water, both to the Democrats who are now calling for the full release of the Epstein files and to the anonymous Republican strategists who have begun to warn of a drop in turnout in the midterms.

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In the post-pandemic atmosphere of fury and distrust, Trump moved much more nimbly than the Democrats to expand his support among people who are only irregularly interested in politics, and he has reached a group that is young, nonwhite, male, and less likely to have a college degree. That group, and the podcasters whom they supply with an audience, has seemed drawn to Trump’s persona as an outsider, an inveigher against the establishment. And yet, in the six months since the Inauguration, what Trump, despite adopting a cruel and autocratic style, has given them are Republican establishment policies: a budget that cuts Medicaid, stripping seventeen million people of health insurance, and gives huge tax breaks to the rich; a military intervention in the Middle East. A CNN poll released on Wednesday suggests that the number of Americans who “approve strongly” of Trump’s Presidency—one measure of his base—is now at its lowest of any point in his first and second terms.

No wonder Trump sounds so exasperated. (On Thursday, he said that Bondi would produce “any and all” grand-jury testimony from Epstein’s case, though this seems unlikely to satisfy anyone.) The central illusion of his political career has been that, despite his wealth and evident clout, he remains an outsider. But that was always a fiction, and now—with the G.O.P. leadership unified behind him and the Supreme Court mostly backing him—he may feel strong enough to leave some of his movement’s weirdness behind. Second-term Trump is no longer acting as a populist, and the Epstein case is unfolding as a test of how maga responds to this news. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/behind-trumps-jeffrey-epstein-problem