The president of the United States is trying with all his might to get people — his base, the press, members of Congress — to stop talking about his deep and well documented connection to the country’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker. It does not, as yet, appear to be working!
On Tuesday morning, most major outlets still had stories about Jeffrey Epstein on or near the top of their homepages. The chum that Trump has been tossing out in the direction of the MAGA crowd does not seem to have satisfied them, no matter what Steve Bannon, of all people, insists on repeating to basically all of those outlets. Because the noise simply refuses to die down, the administration alternates its frantic distraction attempts with baby steps in the case itself, first asking a federal court to unseal grand jury testimony that no one really asked for, and then announcing that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche will seek to meet with Epstein associate and convicted trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Usually, this sort of thing works out for the big guy. When something goes wrong, he just changes the subject, and a base that is entirely in the bag for him happily follows along, wagging the press along with it. The problem here, as many have pointed out, is that Trump has spent a decade basically fanning these specific flames, encouraging the far-right fever dream about a cabal of elite monsters with Epstein at their center just waiting to be taken down by righteous fury and flame. Pulling the plug on that for what sure seem like obviously dodgy reasons might not go as smoothly as similar moves in the past.
Then again, it might! We’re a decade into this, and assuming any sort of consequence for anything he does is preposterous. His friends in Congress are willing to literally put their agenda on hold in order to avoid even voting on an effort to release whatever Epstein files do exist. People like Bannon are out there juking the press into saying that the base is, in fact, getting back in line, evidence be damned. After yelling about Obama and the Washington Commanders and so on, Trump might try a “their vision is based on movement” approach and sit largely still for a couple days and see if things die down.
What seems clear at least at this moment is that this is not like other scandals. That does not suggest any particular outcome; but it’s worth continuing to talk about it, just to see what happens.
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