To hear Donald Trump’s critics tell it, all the disquieting news that the president has generated this summer—the FBI raid on former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home, the National Guard deployment in cities, Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, his accusation that Barack Obama led a coup and committed “the crime of the century”—has been an effort to divert attention from the issue that truly terrifies Trump: the Jeffrey Epstein files.
It has become the Democrats’ go-to exhortation: Trump is just doing this to distract you from Epstein. Do not fall for his grand scheme. In other words, America’s descent into authoritarianism is a mere deflection.
No doubt, the president’s past friendship with the late financier and accused sex trafficker is a legitimate problem for the White House. Trump has repeatedly tried to dismiss the matter, calling it “a Democrat hoax that never ends” as recently as Wednesday. But it has proved to be a rare Trump controversy that has shaken his otherwise steadfast base. His supporters were adamant during the 2024 campaign that Trump should release the Epstein files, and candidate Trump assured that he would. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” In fact, there was no such list, the Justice Department later announced. A MAGA mutiny ensued.
Democrats saw an opportunity and began accusing the president of creating all manner of diversions to steal attention from his Epstein entanglements. They have not stopped since, no matter how extraneous the scandal might be to the topic at hand—everything from ICE raids down to Trump’s demand that the Washington Commanders change their name back to the Redskins and his threats to revoke Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship. You name the recent escapade, and some adversary has tried to dub it a ploy to distract from Epstein.
Upon learning that Trump had canceled former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer retaliated by slapping Trump with a clever nickname, “Epstein Don” (take that, Mr. President!), and said that Trump was “ready to put everyone he can in danger to distract you from how he’s hiding the Epstein files.”
After Trump said that “CROOKED” Senator Adam Schiff should “be brought to justice,” the California Democrat accused Trump of “political retribution” and “retaliation,” in addition to “trying to distract from his Epstein-files problem.”
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington State, recently called Trump “a pathetic wannabe dictator” for sending federal agents and the National Guard into the District of Columbia. Murray claimed that he was trying to turn D.C. “into his personal police state” with a mission to—get this—“distract you from his connection to the Epstein files.”
This is a curious strategy. Clearly, Trump’s opponents think they have a killer weapon with Epstein and believe that they should deploy it whenever possible; polls show that large majorities of Americans are not buying Trump’s assertion that the Epstein story is a “hoax.” But Trump’s strongman tactics are a far greater danger to America than his proclivity to “distract,” which is a fairly standard political-communications practice.
The distraction drumbeat not only dilutes the seriousness of Trump’s actions; it also exemplifies the Democrats’ own lame efforts to communicate a potent opposition message. It would seem beside the point for them to divert the public’s attention from the things this president does that are truly devious, un-American, and totalitarian. (See: Obama, Barack, fake AI-generated video of Oval Office arrest.) By constantly warning citizens not to lose focus on Epstein, Democrats imply that Trump’s day-to-day abuses in office are mere stunts and can thus be safely ignored.
“It’s so stupid. It drives me insane,” Dan Pfeiffer, a Pod Save America co-host and former senior adviser to President Obama, told me. Democrats’ overeagerness to “shoehorn” everything Trump does into some alleged Epstein cover-up looks forced and inauthentic, Pfeiffer added. “If all you have to say is ‘Don’t pay attention to this, pay attention to this other thing that polls better,’ you’re not actually motivating people.” Other fervent anti-Trumpers have expressed similar frustration. “I want to congratulate leading Democrats for their insistence on saying the takeover of DC is a ‘stunt’ or a ‘distraction,’” Bill Kristol, the editor at large of the center-right publication The Bulwark, wrote on X. “It’s a rare trifecta of intellectual failure, political stupidity, and moral obtuseness.”
And yet Democrats continue to hurl the magic words in response to seemingly every brazen thing Trump does. Maryland Governor Wes Moore recently found himself in a social-media beef with Trump over the president’s threat to send the National Guard into “out of control” and “crime-ridden” Baltimore. Trump also suggested that he might “rethink” the federal government’s funding for the repair of Baltimore’s “demolished” Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was toppled by a cargo ship last year. After more back-and-forth, Moore trotted out his big torpedo. “Trump is doing everything in his power to distract from the Epstein files,” the governor wrote on X. “Really makes you wonder…”
Actually, what this makes me wonder is if Democrats’ continuous invocations of the Epstein-distraction line might reveal their own lack of imagination—and underscore their inability to find a more effective line of attack against a president who seems to be providing them with endless material. In fact, Democrats’ eagerness to call everything a distraction from Epstein might even be distracting them from discussing much bigger and far-reaching vulnerabilities for Trump (his failure to bring down prices, as he promised; the Republicans’ massive and wildly unpopular reconciliation bill passed in July).
With Congress back in Washington after its summer recess, the Epstein story flared anew Wednesday morning when a group of his accusers held an emotional press conference outside the Capitol. “There is no hoax,” one Epstein survivor said. “The abuse was real.” The same morning, Trump was hosting Polish President Karol Nawrocki for a White House visit that featured a rare flyover of F-16s. A White House spokesperson said that the display was meant to honor a Polish army pilot who had died in a crash last month. But the spectacle also produced a long, loud roar over a large area of downtown Washington, which interrupted the victims’ testimony for several seconds—an actual distraction, in contrast to some of the Democrats’ more tortured claims.
*Sources: Joe Raedle / Getty; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Bill Clark / CQ / Roll Call; Alex Wong / Getty; Ethan Miller / Getty
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