Update: Since this was filed, Charlie Kirk has abandoned his pledge to stop talking about Epstein and has returned to the topic. It is further proof that MAGA influencers are torn between their love of conspiracy theories and their desire to cover for Trump.
One usually thinks of cover-ups as secret affairs conducted behind closed doors, but Donald Trump is running the conspiracy to kill the Jeffrey Epstein files right out in the open. Despite Trump and his allies promising for years that they would release all the Justice Department documents on the infamous sex trafficker, now that he’s in the White House, Trump has very much changed his mind.
It’s not surprising. He was close friends with Epstein, who raped and abused hundreds of underage girls and young women. While it’s unlikely Trump has specific knowledge of what the Justice Department has in its unreleased case files, he seems worried about what is in them, considering how often he partied with Epstein throughout their years of friendship. This makes it all the more remarkable that Trump is orchestrating the cover-up in public.
It’s not just that he went on Truth Social on Saturday and ordered his minions to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein.” The president been working the phones, reaching out individually to right-wing pundits and influencers, telling them to give up on trying to get Attorney General Pam Bondi to release more information. After receiving such a phone call on Sunday night, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk grumpily told his podcast audience on Monday, “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being.” (He’s since backtracked.) Prominent MAGA influencers who spent the weekend harping on Epstein conspiracy theories suddenly all switched, in unison, to pretending to care about some weird conspiracy theory involving former President Joe Biden using an autopen. Fox News hosts also enforced the Epstein blackout, only bringing it up once on Monday when Laura Ingraham — who previously had been demanding a release of the files — suddenly instructed her audience to forget about it. And in the crowning achievement of a very public cover-up, on Monday night House Republicans blocked a measure introduced by Democrats to release the Epstein case files. On Tuesday, all but one Republican in the House voted again to block the Epstein files.
The abruptness of the about-face is almost shocking, despite the long history of all these people shaming themselves with their groveling obedience to the former reality TV host turned politician.
The abruptness of the about-face is almost shocking, despite the long history of all these people shaming themselves with their groveling obedience to the former reality TV host turned politician. For the past week, it started to feel like there could be a real rebellion brewing in MAGA over the unwillingness of Trump and Bondi to release more of the evidentiary documents being held by the Justice Department. As I wrote on Monday, more than any other MAGA obsession, the Epstein case gave Trump voters a way to lie to themselves, to believe they are good people, despite being complicit in all of his evil deeds. They didn’t want to give that up without a fight.
It’s a testament to this deep emotional need that House Republicans are still pretending they want to release the Epstein files, even as they do everything in their power to help Trump suppress them. On Tuesday, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post released a story with a wildly misleading headline: “Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans break with Trump on Epstein.” This is false. As the story acknowledges four paragraphs in, Johnson “opposed a procedural motion advanced on Tuesday by Democrats that would have set up a House vote to release them.” He also voted against releasing the Epstein files. But he is claiming he wants “transparency,” even as he fights for censorship.
Trump is playing similar word games. On Tuesday, he told reporters he “would like to see” more documents released, but then immediately made excuses for why that won’t be happening. He insisted Bondi is only withholding evidence that lacks “credibility,” nonsense that is even more ridiculous in light of new reporting from Wired showing the supposed prison surveillance video from the night of Epstein’s death “had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files,” and that nearly three minutes is missing. Besides that, the administration lies about everything, all the time. But Trump knows that pretending he is open to releasing the files will muddy the waters, even as his every action is geared towards suppressing the documentation.
That’s typical of the right. They’ve always claimed to abhor sexual violence with their words. But with their actions, they consistently fight to silence victims and exonerate offenders. It’s not just that they’ve spent the past decade shrugging off the staggering list of accusations against Trump, including the civil jury finding that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Or the way they ignore how Trump surrounds himself with other men who have faced similar credible allegations. Refusing to believe victims — or worse, saying they deserved it — has been standard practice in conservative circles for basically forever. The long, sad march of stories of institutions like the Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention covering up child sex abuse scandals is a testament to how ingrained the culture of tolerance for sexual abuse is in conservative circles.
Trump’s openness about his wish to bury the Epstein files, perversely, is likely what helped so many MAGA leaders make the switch from demands for transparency to the shut-it-down response. Most of them, it seems, had truly convinced themselves that Trump wasn’t featured in the unreleased documents, despite his lengthy friendship with Epstein, which included at least one coy reference in 2002 to a reporter about Epstein’s preference for “younger” sex partners. Many seemed to feel that the Biden administration would have released damning information about Trump if it existed. But this assumption required ignoring that Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, was a stickler for protocol; he would likely have refused to release any names of people not formally charged with related crimes to the public.
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As long as the “Epstein files” existed more in the realm of fantasy, right-wingers could enjoy role-playing the avenging heroes without the worry that it could come back to haunt them. Trump’s freakout, however, took this out of the world of QAnon-style fever dreams and instead pointed to his court-adjudicated history of sexual violence. It’s fun for MAGA to pretend to go after imaginary — or, in Epstein’s case, dead — rapists. But when it comes to real-life sexual predators, especially if they’re privileged white men, MAGA knows what to do: Deny, defend, minimize and protect. They’ve been doing this on Trump’s behalf for a decade now, and his defensive behavior around Epstein was a signal that they should go into shield-the-dirtbag mode.
One telling incident this week showcased the forces that led to this MAGA about-face. Last year, Fox News released an edited interview with Trump where he committed to releasing the Epstein files. This week, the unedited version was circulated, which sees the president teeing up his excuse not to release the documents. “You don’t want to affect people’s lives, if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world,” he said. He then narrowed the promise to release only information about Epstein’s death, notably omitting such a pledge about potential co-conspirators.
This video is being promoted by groups like the Lincoln Project to embarrass Fox News for covering for Trump. But it likely had a sobering effect on his conspiracist base. It’s all fun and games, playing the pedophile hunters — right up until they start to worry about ensnaring the leader they’ve spent a decade defending. Trump himself stated the true MAGA belief on this subject during his deposition in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, when he angrily asserted that sexual abuse has been a privilege enjoyed by “stars” for “the last million years,” adding “unfortunately or fortunately.” Later on CNN, he clarified that he meant “fortunately” for men, but “unfortunately for her.”
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Not all hope is lost. As journalist Lindsay Beyerstein wrote this week, there is a small but noteworthy group of Trump supporters who really believe all that QAnon claptrap that “Trump is on a divine mission to fight the pedophile cabal of the deep state.” Openly suppressing government documents that could reveal the identities of real-life elites committing degenerate acts is the exact opposite of what they believe he promised them.
Some will almost certainly find their way back to Trump, perhaps by believing his lie that the “Epstein files” are a forgery created by former President Barack Obama. But Trump’s coalition isn’t robust. It was barely enough to win him the 2024 election in a squeaker, and it is already being eroded by his unpopular economic and immigration policies. Losing even 10 percent of his conspiracist base could hurt him a lot politically.
The pathetic rally-round-the-leader response to Trump’s cover-up is a reminder that MAGA never cared about sex abuse. They cared about their fantasies of heroism. They cared about rationalizing their indefensible support of Trump. They cared about looking like good people, but not about being good people.
When the chips are down, the MAGA base will always choose power over justice. Trump forced that choice. Most of them didn’t even hesitate to do the wrong thing.
