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No, Nate Silver: Epstein is not the new Russiagate [View all]
No, Nate Silver: Epstein is not the new Russiagate
The numbers show the scandal is worse for Trump than you think
By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published August 3, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)
(Salon) Nate Silver is just asking questions. “Is Epstein the new Russiagate?,” the famed statistician wondered in his newsletter this week.
For over a month now, President Donald Trump has faced increasing pressure over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who authorities say died by suicide in a federal jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The unexpected re-emergence of the Epstein scandal — which is largely due to the Trump administration’s abrupt pivot after promising transparency on the case and its files — has caused a sustained media fury, a rather unique phenomenon in the Trump era. And that seems to be Silver’s main gripe.
Arguing that the scandal is not “6-stories-every-day-newsworthy,” he claimed “the feeding frenzy around Epstein has caused some political junkies to forget that Trump is often impervious to consequences.” To make his point, Silver said the entire saga reminds him of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, a topic to which the Trump administration has been desperate to divert the media’s attention:
In the way the Epstein story has hijacked the news cycle, and with the constant predictions of spiraling damage to Trump’s political standing, it reminds me of another story that lent itself to episodic coverage: Russiagate.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which every minor Russia-related revelation in the story made news in 2017 and 2018, completely taking over the Rachel Maddow Show, for instance, from its formerly more policy-wonkish past. Liberals were literally selling prayer candles labeled “pee tape” showing Robert Mueller as a saint-like figure, convinced that the walls were caving in around Trump. Facebook ads from Russian bot farms that made up an infinitesimal fraction of the content voters were consuming in 2016 were blown up into a huge scandal.
I’ll assert that Russiagate didn’t end well for Democrats, but I’ll admit that’s hard to prove. Trump’s approval rating did decline significantly in 2017 — more steeply than so far in his second term — and Democrats did have a pretty good 2018 midterm. What I think is clearer is that the obsessive coverage of the case probably insulated Trump from more serious scandals that came along later.
....(snip)....
Silver also argued “the evidence that the broader public is greatly concerned about the details of Epstein is pretty thin.” He pointed to Google search traffic on the issue, which he noted has been lower than searches on tariffs in April after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of a global trade war. But Epstein, unlike tariffs, is a known concept to most Americans. As even Silver admits, the Epstein saga has had “plenty of time for punditry and speculation.” That’s why a Yahoo/YouGov poll found the scandal had the fourth highest “heard a lot” score recorded since 2020. ..................(more)
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/03/no-nate-silver-epstein-is-not-the-new-russiagate/
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