If there is one Washington art that Donald Trump has perfected, it is surely that of scandal management. After two impeachments, four indictments, and more head-exploding controversies than anyone could possibly count, his playbook of denial, deflection, and distraction is achingly familiar—though it should be noted that, given how much of what he says and does is scandalous, the label has generally lost all meaning when applied to his Presidency. In his second term, Trump now benefits from the presumption of his own survival from even the most politically debilitating of stories. And how could he not? A man who can win reëlection after inciting a mob of supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol is hardly going to be brought down by more quotidian offenses like monetizing the White House for his own purposes or openly defying court orders. All of which raises a definitional question: Is it still a scandal if there is no possibility that the accused will face any meaningful consequences?
And yet, six months into Trump 2.0, the President is enmeshed in a genuinely metastasizing scandal over his ties to the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It has all the classic Washington elements: a burgeoning coverup, a daily drumbeat of damaging stories, anonymous finger-pointing from senior Administration officials, bipartisan congressional demands for investigations, cratering poll numbers. Phrases such as “exploding bombshell” and “full-on dumpster fire” are being thrown about. The Attorney General and the F.B.I.’s deputy director are said to have shouted at each other. Trump himself, while privately disclaiming any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal wrongdoing, is reportedly resigned to weeks more of this—“they’re going to fuck me anyways,” he said in front of a recent Republican visitor to the Oval Office, per Politico.
On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House early for its monthlong August recess in an effort to avoid politically damaging votes related to the Epstein mess. This was a pretty dramatic act of congressional panic. (“What we’re simply wanting to do here is give him cover,” Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, said of Trump when a similar measure was killed on the Senate floor.) And yet it did nothing to stop things from getting worse for the President. A day later, recess be damned, a House Oversight subcommittee voted, 8–2, to subpoena the Justice Department for Epstein records that the Trump Administration has refused to release.
The records are the proximate cause of all the fuss. Earlier this month, Trump’s Justice Department said that it would not release them, a crushing blow for the President’s most fervent MAGA acolytes, who had hoped that he would help prove their years-old conspiracy theories about an Epstein ring of celebrity Democratic pedophiles and deep-state enablers. A new Wall Street Journal story—the aforementioned bombshell—strongly suggested a reason: in May, Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and her deputy, had told him privately that his name is in the Epstein files, a fact that he lied about publicly when asked about it earlier this month. “No, no,” he said on July 15th. Now we are shocked—shocked—that the answer should have been: Yes, yes, and what of it?
On the surface, it’s a classic Washington gotcha. No surprise that there have been lots of predictably sanctimonious allusions to Howard Baker’s most quotable Watergate moment; these political feeding frenzies almost invariably come down to Baker’s question of what did the President know and when did he know it. But this is Trump we’re talking about, and this scandal, I regret to inform you, is not on the level. In fact, we’ve known for years about Trump’s sleazy dealings with Epstein—one particularly awful aspect of this particularly awful story is having to watch, over and over again, that 1992 video of the two of them partying, which is recirculated online with each incremental new development. In Trump’s first term, his appointee as head of the Labor Department, Alex Acosta, resigned after controversy over his role as a former Florida prosecutor in giving Epstein a sweetheart plea deal. And remember when Trump said of Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “I just wish her well”? Here we are five years later, and Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General and former personal lawyer, travelled to interview Maxwell in a federal courthouse in Florida on Thursday, supposedly in search of additional evidence. Hmm . . . .
The scandal, then, is not the revelation that Trump was friends with a sexual monster who exploited underage women, since it is not a revelation. Nor is it that the President lied to the American public, something he does with remarkable frequency. No, the novelty here is that millions of Americans who knew that Trump was friends with such a horrid man and voted for him anyway now appear to have decided that, in a choice between Trump and a favorite conspiracy theory, they may just stick with the conspiracy theory.
Hardly great news for the Republic, even if it is also problematic for Trump’s political standing, which, according to Gallup, hit a second-term low this week, of just thirty-seven per cent approval. The nearly unwavering fealty of Trump’s MAGA base has powered him through all of his previous scandals; what does it reveal about the state of this political mesalliance that a botched coverup of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein might be the thing that finally drives a wedge between them?
Trump’s strategy to win back his base unintentionally reveals what he thinks of them—throw them lies, new made-up lies to supplant the old made-up lies, and package them with as much visceral hatred and crude racism as possible. The purest distillation of this was an A.I.-generated video of former President Barack Obama being handcuffed in the Oval Office, which Trump promoted on his social-media account over the weekend.
This revolting clip seems to represent what Trump imagines to be the ultimate MAGA fever dream—a ritual humiliation and debasement of America’s first Black President. Accompanying the video has been an elaborate new conspiracy theory, rolled out by Trump and various advisers in subsequent days, that involves Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the former leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, and the Presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024. Its main premise is that Russia did NOT intervene in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and the intelligence finding that it did was part of an attempted “coup” against Trump that is allegedly still ongoing.
In Trump’s first term, when he said awful stuff like this, even many of his Republican allies publicly distanced themselves from it. There was squirming. There were embarrassed silences. Not now. If there were any G.O.P. members of Congress who denounced the disgusting video of Obama, I missed it. Not a single one, as far as I am aware, could be found to issue even a Susan Collins-esque statement of “concern.” Including Susan Collins. Instead, senators such as Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn on Thursday demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the allegations, apparently having forgotten that there already was a special prosecutor—John Durham—who spent more than three years doing so and failed to come up with anything remotely like the Obama-and-everybody-else grand unification Russiagate theory that Trump is now promoting. Cornyn, it should be noted, was also a member of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee who signed on to its bipartisan report concluding unequivocally that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
The point is that they’re still more than willing to go along with Trump’s lies so long as they don’t conflict with one of their other crazy stories. That goes for MAGA senators and for the MAGA base—and it explains why we’re in such a mess. Sorry, Jeffrey Epstein truthers; this is the biggest scandal of them all. ♦
