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.
The president, for his part, appears to understand the authenticity of the anger better than Silver. So he’s downplayed concerns about Epstein, calling some of his supporters “weaklings” for buying into what he sold them for years.
Trying to turn the Epstein playbook back on Trump’s critics serves to blunt righteous criticism that the Epstein Files are completely upending online spaces where young men, a key demographic of Trump supporters, talk — spaces the mainstream media have no control over. The president, for his part, appears to understand the authenticity of the anger better than Silver. So he’s downplayed concerns about Epstein, calling some of his supporters “weaklings” for buying into what he sold them for years. He repeatedly tells his base to move on. Some are listening. “Among Republicans, Trump’s approval has actually ticked up a point since Epstein became a focal point, while his disapproval rating has declined by one point,” Silver concluded in his analysis.
But several of his most prominent supporters are not. And seemingly every hour, there’s a steady drip of information keeping the media spotlight on the scandal. That’s why Trump’s tactics of diversion and distraction have grown so desperate.
Case in point: Earlier this week, many of the president’s most ardent QAnon supporters — a group ostensibly committed to a project holding elites they imagine are guilty of child predation accountable — publicly abandoned him, including QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley, who was infamous for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a horned fur hat while exposing his bare chest. After losing their support, a Media Matters analysis found that Trump amplified QAnon conspiracy theories on Truth Social 14 times in one day this week. As the organization’s president Angelo Carusone explained to MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, Trump is “trying to get those QAnon people to believe that somehow he’s playing fifth-dimensional chess and that there’s something he’s going to do. He’s going to give them accountability soon.”
Despite Silver’s suggestion the president has not lost support, polling this week has shown a noticeable Epstein-related dip for Trump and his handling of the scandal.
A round of recently released polls shows that Trump’s handling of the scandal is approved by less than a majority of Republicans.Even worse, nearly a majority of Republican respondents think a government cover-up is underway, according to a recently released Economist/YouGov poll conducted July 25-28. In a new Yahoo/YouGov poll taken from July 24-28, 55% of Republicans think the government is “hiding information about Epstein’s client list.”
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.
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Silver is correct to identify issues like immigration and the economy as the most important factors to the electorate writ large. To be sure, the news is bad on those fronts as well. A recent Gallup poll found twice as many Americans strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration as approve of it. But what Silver’s analysis misses is that polling suggests Epstein is the issue most likely to finally fracture Trump’s support among his seemingly unmovable MAGA cohort. Only 44 percent of Republicans — roughly half the number who applaud his approach to immigration — approve of how Trump has dealt with the investigation so far.
It’s important to recall that Trump’s abysmal first-term poll numbers contributed to the Republican wipeout in the 2018 midterms, and likely to Trump’s 2020 defeat as well. Aside from the question of whether Epstein ultimately hurts Trump with voters who elected him in 2024, any comparison to the Russian interference investigation is doing the president’s work for him.
Trump has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that Epstein-related stories are boosting his popularity. This comes as two of Epstein’s alleged victims and the family of another released two remarkable statements this week. First, the family of the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims who died by suicide in April, blasted the president for saying this week that Epstein “stole” the then-16-year-old from a job at Mar-a-Lago. On Friday they joined Annie and Maria Farmer to criticize the White House for permitting the relocation of convicted sex trafficker and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to a federal prison camp after Justice Department lawyers met with her for two days last week and reportedly gained her cooperation in answering questions about the case. “President Trump has sent a clear message today,” the group said. “Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter.” Maxwell’s conviction as a sex offender would typically make her ineligible for the minimum-security camp.
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Media coverage is always a judgment call — like Silver’s decision to use his column to promote the fact that Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market where he works as an advisor, allows people to bet on who might be linked to the child sex trafficking scandal. Silver laments that “on the left, there’s been a pervasive tendency — I call it ‘The Big Cope‘ — to attribute whatever problems Democrats are having to media coverage,” as if making decisions about news content is a partisan problem that he’s immune to. Since gaining fame with a generational run that inarguably brought the field of polling analysis into the modern era, he has famously spent much of his time complaining about media coverage of COVID-19 and former President Joe Biden’s gait.
With the president parading a registered sex offender, NFL Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor, around the White House this week, perhaps Nate Silver should stick to his first instinct that “maybe respectable college-educated, center-left types like me should have been paying more attention to Epstein all along.”
