Donald Trump once boldly claimed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. In the decade since, as Mr. Trump has persisted through scandals, controversies and an array of thorny challenges, I have been asked the same question over and over again in my capacity as a pollster: Will this be the thing that costs him his supporters?
It almost never is. Save for a moment after Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump’s support from his base has been rock solid.
But the recent turmoil over the files on the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — including the truly horrific sex crimes Mr. Epstein was convicted and accused of, the strange secrecy around it all, the conspiracy theories that flourish — has people asking: Might this be different? Is this the one?
So far, there’s little evidence to show that the fixation on the president’s past relationship with Mr. Epstein is taking a significant political toll. Polling by The Wall Street Journal conducted shortly after the Epstein story blew up again recorded Mr. Trump’s job approval at the same level, 46 percent, that it was in its polling in April. Concerns like cost of living, immigration and the state of the economy remain dominant among Americans.
At the same time, while the Epstein saga has done little to dent Mr. Trump’s overall popularity, it is perhaps the starkest example of a schism between the president and his most loyal supporters.
A growing volume of data shows that Mr. Trump’s own voters nevertheless harbor concerns about how the Epstein issue is being handled. While Republicans routinely give Mr. Trump favorable job approval ratings on a wide range of subjects, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed that only four in 10 Republicans said they approved of his administration’s handling of the Epstein files. In a Washington Post poll published this week, only 38 percent of all Republicans — and 43 percent of MAGA Republicans — said they approved of the president’s handling of the Epstein files.
Why has this issue taken root and not Mr. Trump’s other acts that have at times been at odds with his supporters? The popular podcaster Joe Rogan, for example, recently voiced skepticism about the decision to bomb nuclear sites in Iran and the widespread nature of the administration’s deportations. Some congressional Republicans balked at components of Mr. Trump’s agenda in his signature domestic policy bill. But those issues were more centered on ideological or policy disputes and have not dogged Mr. Trump the way the Epstein mess has.
Some of the damage is self-inflicted. Mr. Trump can’t stop talking about Mr. Epstein, even as he exhorts people to move on, calling it “pretty boring stuff.” This week he surprised reporters aboard Air Force One with a new explanation for his falling out with Mr. Epstein, telling them that he ended the relationship because the financier “stole people” who were employed at Mar-a-Lago. It was the latest in a series of attempts to play down his connection to Mr. Epstein.
But a deeper explanation for the stickiness of the issue is that it undermines the brand he has forged for his supporters, running directly counter to a core attribute that fuses Mr. Trump’s base to him: the sense that he is an outsider, fighting against a hostile class of insiders.
As a lyric from a great Ben Folds song put it: “Once you wanted revolution. / Now you’re the institution. / How’s it feel to be the Man? / It’s no fun to be the Man.”
Now that he has returned to the presidency, Mr. Trump has rarely had a problem getting his allies to support him on uncomfortable terrain, from ideology and policy to tone and tenor. The sheer force of his hold on the Republican Party’s base and on G.O.P. lawmakers in Congress has afforded him the ability to engage in apostasies against norms and conventional conservatism, with only the merest peep of opposition.
Mr. Trump never presented himself as a saint or a rock-ribbed conservative. He memorably ran for president in 2016 against more than a dozen Republican adversaries who fought for the mantle of being the truest conservative. He prevailed even though he wound up being viewed as a conservative by fewer than half of voters that year. When he pushes boundaries on free-market principles, business friendliness, free trade or limited government, he may cause the Freedom Caucus heartburn, but his voters are largely unperturbed.
But Mr. Trump has always held himself up as an outsider, an opponent of the elites, a thorn in the side of the powerful and the establishment. It is this inside-outside dynamic that let him overcome the right-left ideological battles that might have otherwise undone him in the 2016 primaries. And it is that outsider status that has endured, even as Mr. Trump has been twice elected president of the United States.
The reason outsider status is critical to Mr. Trump’s hold on his voters is that disdain for elites and politicians remains sky high, especially among the MAGA faithful. In my firm’s polling from June, we asked voters which statement they agree with more: that most politicians are honorable public servants trying to do the right thing for the country or that most are corrupt or just looking out for their own interests. Some 68 percent of Trump voters took the more cynical view. That’s significantly higher than the 57 percent of 2024 Kamala Harris voters who said the same.
The Epstein story is so sad, so sordid and so completely off the traditional ideological spectrum that it has escaped the bonds of our usual right-left divides. Instead it seems to be bringing together unconventional allies who share only a distaste for the establishment and a heartfelt belief that elites get to play by a different set of rules in our society today. It is this through line, a skepticism of elites and institutions, more than anything ideological that ties the fans of someone like Mr. Rogan to the political project of Mr. Trump, and I believe this is why the Epstein case is called out as a “line in the sand” — as Mr. Rogan termed it — when Iran and immigration policies are not.
As right and left converge in their skepticism and with institutions of all kinds experiencing high levels of bipartisan distrust, “nothing to see here; move along” simply doesn’t cut it. Voters are hungry for transparency and accountability. Efforts to silence the calls to release the Epstein files have only focused more attention on the issue.
If Mr. Trump is to satisfy his base and put the issue behind him, he will need to deliver on what he promised as an outsider now that he is on the inside.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is a Republican pollster and a speaker, commentator and the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
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