The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren’t.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,” Donald Trump scolded a reporter who asked about Epstein in July. Trump went on to suggest that the question was a “desecration” of the memory of those who had recently died in floods in the Texas Hill Country.
It was a strangely aggressive reaction from the man whose most fervent supporters had spent years talking about Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison before his last trial, in which he faced charges for the trafficking of minors. (His associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex-trafficking charges.) During the 2024 campaign, Trump, when asked, pledged to release documents related to the investigation, commonly referred to as the “Epstein files.” A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles.
“Trump says he will release the Epstein client list if elected,” the right-wing propagandist account Libs of TikTok wrote in September of 2024. “The Democrat elites are shaking rn.”
Well, a year later, someone is certainly shaking.
On Wednesday, congressional lawmakers released thousands of emails from the Epstein estate. House Democrats highlighted three, including one in which Epstein told Maxwell that one of the women who accused him of abuse had “spent hours at my house” with Trump. “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote in 2019 to the journalist Michael Wolff. In another email exchange between them, from 2015, Epstein was trying to game out how Trump might respond if asked by reporters about their relationship. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff advised. Or “you can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” (There are yet more Epstein files that the Trump Justice Department is trying to keep under wraps; a House vote on the matter is coming next week.)
Asked whether Trump had spent “hours” at Epstein’s home with one of his victims, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided an angry word salad that was missing the crucial ingredient: a denial.
Trump is now calling the whole thing a “hoax,” his favorite term to communicate to his supporters that they should ignore any evidence of potential Trump wrongdoing. But he’s been trying to hush his supporters up on Epstein for a while. In July, Trump posted a screed on Truth Social insisting that people should not “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” A few days later, The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a signed birthday note for Epstein allegedly from Trump, which included Trump’s familiar signature below an outline of a naked female figure. Trump sued the Journal over the article, and right-wing media got the message: no more Epstein talk.
The Fox News host Jesse Watters went from accusing Democrats of “running interference for a dead pedophile” to claiming that Democrats’ calls to release the Epstein files were “just another political attack.” The right-wing podcaster Michael Knowles said in September that the “vast majority of” Epstein victims were “just hookers threatening to reveal the names of their johns.” As Matt Gertz wrote in July, mentions of Epstein on Fox News dwindled following Trump’s demand.
Explaining what happened here is relatively easy. As long as conservatives believed that the Epstein files would provide a pretext for persecuting “Democrat elites,” it was politically advantageous to speculate about who might be implicated or suggest that those people had Epstein killed. As soon as it became clear that Trump himself was in said files, all those right-wing media influencers, who had promised their audience a lib bloodbath, began to drop or downplay the issue. The DOJ’s attempt to block the release of more files does not necessarily mean they contain a smoking gun or other damaging information; although Trump has an almost supernatural lack of shame, his overdeveloped sense of pride often motivates irrational and odd behavior. Nevertheless, what we already know about Trump’s relationship with Epstein is disturbing.
When the emails were released on Wednesday, the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly insisted on some curious distinctions, saying about Epstein on her podcast, “I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.” Well, as long as we’re not making excuses!
The flip on Epstein reflects a consistent pattern. Some on the right have exploited the fear of and fascination with lurid sex crimes as a convenient pretext for persecuting LGBTQ people. For the past few years, some right-wing activists and politicians have relentlessly accused gay and trans people of “grooming” children. That word usually refers to predators manipulating vulnerable victims in an attempt to abuse them, but in this context it’s applied to people telling kids it’s okay to be gay or trans. Fears of such “grooming” have been used as a justification to push for discriminatory laws, ban art or literature featuring LGBTQ themes or by LGBTQ artists, and deny gender-affirming medical care to those who need it.
Conservatives did this even as they supported a candidate for president who was not only caught on audio bragging about sexual assault, but who was found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law, and who then proceeded to appoint Cabinet officials who were credibly accused of sexual assault or of covering it up. No one in the Trump administration has talked seriously about how America might reduce or prevent sexual violence through public policy—if anything, the government is pushing policies that would make it easier to get away with abuse or harassment, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s promise to the military that there will be “no more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations.” One could argue, as a matter of opinion, that the #MeToo movement was overzealous; but as a factual matter it did not spare prominent Democrats and was concerned with preventing sexual assault and harassment across lines of party and ideology.
By contrast, the moment that documentation emerged of Trump’s associations with Epstein, his defenders started drawing fine distinctions between different kinds of child sexual abuse, just in case. As long as sex crimes might justify rumormongering about a political rival, or a smear campaign against a marginalized group, right-wing media incessantly promoted conspiracy theories about the issue. But as soon as one of their own became implicated, they conveniently lost interest, or began minimizing Epstein’s crimes.
“Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring?” future Vice President J. D. Vance posted on Twitter in 2021. “And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don’t talk about it.”
Well. Now I guess we know why.
The post Did Anyone Care About the Sex Crimes? appeared first on The Atlantic.
