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Many MAGA supporters and those on the progressive left both believe that the powerful live by a different set of rules.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
An e-mail from Jeffrey Epstein to a journalist about Donald Trump claimed that “of course he knew about the girls.”
Of course he did, if an e-mail is to be believed that was sent by a convicted sex offender about someone he was inclined to frame, and ruin, or – in the infelicitous phrase that might take a place beside Watergate classics like “limited modified hangout” – “take him down.”
But what is significant – what is roiling American politics now and has the potential not to take Mr. Trump down but rather to splinter his MAGA movement – is who is revelling in the revelation, itself an unverifiable statement that stops well short of being a piece of evidence. There is so far no evidence at all that Mr. Trump was involved with any of the sexual liaisons in the Epstein circle.
And what also is consequential is how this episode converges not only with the most sacred assumptions of the new conservatism – the notion that the powerful live by preferential rules unavailable to the rest of the country – but also with the rising progressivism that is becoming an increasingly powerful faction of the Democratic Party.
“The Trump true believers and the progressives on the left are both saying that the rich and the powerful are too rich and too powerful,” said Jeffrey Bloodworth, a Gannon University political historian who studies contemporary American liberalism. “This is where their views meet.”
That is a dangerous confluence of convictions, both for Mr. Trump and for establishment Democrats, themselves vulnerable for being part of the established order that is under constant pressure in the new politics of resentment.
Epstein alleged Trump ‘spent hours’ with a victim at his house, in e-mails released by Democrats
The danger to Mr. Trump is not so much from Representative Ro Khanna of California, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, perhaps the Republican in the House of Representatives who is most antagonistic to the President. They are the two lawmakers pressing to force the release of thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents, many of which are unlikely to reveal much of anything.
It comes instead from a set of high-profile GOP women ordinarily the most loyal of Trump supporters: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
These three customarily turn up in news stories defending Mr. Trump or assailing powerful Republicans for not being conservative enough or for not being loyal enough to the President. Now they are Trump antagonists, at least on this issue – so much so that Mr. Trump has been trying to wave them off their mission to join Democrats in voting to require the Justice Department to release a substantial new tranche of documents from its investigation involving Mr. Epstein and his long-time associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Mr. Trump has reacted with fury, arguing in a social-media post that “the Democrats are using the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax to try and deflect from their massive failures, in particular, their most recent one — THE SHUTDOWN!”
A string of stubborn facts in this matter does not seem to matter.
One is that during the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump himself had called for the release of the material. It was part of his effort, applauded by the MAGA multitudes, to underline how the powerful had sway over the political and judicial systems of the country. That was then. This is now.
Another is that even if the effort to release the documents prevails in the House – it requires an arcane procedural manoeuvre called a “discharge petition,” which has rarely prevailed in the past 94 years – the measure has no chance in the Senate, where the Republicans have control and where a separate arcane procedural feature would require not a majority but instead a three-fifths margin to prevail.
A third is that in the exceedingly unlikely eventuality that the measure actually passed both houses on Capitol Hill, it surely would be vetoed by Mr. Trump.
But this is an age of performative politics, with much legislation crafted more to score a point than to enact a law. In short, it is a perfect representation of the times.
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Protest art representing President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein outside the entrance to Bustboys and Poets restaurant in the U Street neighborhood of Washington.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press
Another element of this contretemps is a far more significant representation of the times.
This episode is not solely a drive to examine Mr. Trump’s relationship with an odious figure he later spurned, nor an effort to determine whether Mr. Trump is a sexual adventurer, which he has repeatedly denied. Those are sideshows, as juicy and provocative as they are, and thus also perfect for this tabloid age.
If it were just those elements, this episode would be about essentially nothing but fodder for social media and the dark corners of cable television, especially since it has the added spice of falling into the category of sex trafficking, which is one of the favourite bugbears of conspiracy theorists who devoutly believe that the rich and powerful are running criminal coerced-sex rings involving underage victims.
But in a way this episode is about everything.
The overriding theme of Mr. Trump’s political life and the MAGA vanguard that he created is that an elite governing class runs the United States. That is the notion that also animates the progressive left – and that earlier this month catapulted an obscure 34-year-old New York State assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani, to becoming the mayor-elect of New York City. Thus Jeffrey Epstein – dead for more than six years – is the unlikely figure at the centre of contemporary American politics.
