Republican leaders support Trump’s efforts to hide the truth. How much of the MAGA base will follow suit?
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.” 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.
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 released a story with a wildly misleading headline: “Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans break with Trump on Epstein.
