Writing about the Jeffrey Epstein saga has the feeling of using an air horn. It calls a great deal of attention to oneself, produces unpredictable and intense results in its audience and really should be saved for moments when it’s absolutely necessary — scaring off a charging bear, preventing a maritime disaster, being Pitbull, etc.
Then you read something like this: “[Speaker Mike Johnson] went on to say, ‘[President Trump] was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.’” And you find yourself pulling open the junk drawer in the kitchen and rummaging for that air horn you bought as a stocking stuffer last Christmas.
When the Speaker then clarified that he was only “reiterating what the victims’ attorney said” — the part about how Trump had cooperated with investigators during the first Epstein prosecution but not the part about how the president had done an “about-face” — then you’ve got to push that little red button.
It would be one thing if the Speaker had a reputation as a liar, but even his fiercest enemies would have to acknowledge that Johnson is known to be a very honest man. Or if Johnson were stupid, it might be reasonable to think that he didn’t know how police informants work. But Johnson, a lawyer and law professor, has proven to be a lot smarter than most in Washington. He keeps passing bill after bill despite having a majority thinner than the ones that ate his three immediate Republican predecessors alive.
The most obvious and unpleasant explanation for why Johnson would say that Donald Trump was undercover for the FBI trying to bring down an international ring of pedophiles is that somebody told him it was true. The list of people who might tell Johnson something like that and whom Johnson would believe well enough to repeat the claim is very, very short. Maybe even just one name long, signed with a flourish…
The obvious part of why it’s not pleasant to write (or read) about the Epstein case is the luridness of all of it. That, of course, is also the largest part of why this story, more than any of the other similarly ripe scandals of the second Trump term, has persisted. The wild buckraking that the president and his family are doing is no less active or ethically profane than it was when the Qataris gave him a jumbo jet and his family was holding soirees for foreign crypto patrons this spring. But sex sells, and the more taboo and shameful the better.
Gen Xers will nod and think of l’affaire du Lewinsky, but even a whiff of sex scandal can turn a boring old corruption story into a scandal with legs. Teapot Dome 100 years ago wouldn’t have wrecked the Harding administration the way it did if it had just been about oil leases. The tawdry behavior of Harding’s Ohio Gang in Washington and the poorly kept secret of the president’s many infidelities let every story about bribes and kickbacks be suffused with a prurience that could really sell newspapers.
Aside from not wanting to to be selling sex, the other reason that Epstein coverage feels distasteful is the degree to which Democrats have glommed on to the story. As Mark Leibovich argued in a recent piece: “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.”
Yup.
I’m all for partisans trying to score points and win elections. It’s their job, after all. But I don’t like adding my air horn to either side’s klaxons. And yet, this, like most durable scandals, seems to be more about how it divides the party in power than how it energizes the opposition. Just making a president a lame duck, a scandal isn’t something that the other side does to you. It has to be about how it exercises the home team.
If the Obama administration had run an undercover operation that put illegal abortion pills into Mexico, it would have infuriated Republicans but drawn shrugs from Democrats. But because it was illegal guns that found their way south of the border, enough Democrats joined the opposition to make the administration take notice.
There are a number of reasons why the Epstein story gets so far into the brains of Republicans and why, unlike all of the rest of the scandals with which Democrats and the press have tried to nuke Trump, so many in the GOP are sticking with the story despite the many incentives to put it in the memory hole.
One is that other Republicans have skin in the game here. This is the first of the Trump scandals since the Jan. 6, 2021, sacking of the Capitol that contemplates a post-Trump political world. There’s no more elections for Trump to win, and how his fellow Republicans conduct themselves around this issue will matter not just for the coming midterm elections but in the 2028 primaries.
Not unlike Hillary Clinton during the whole Benghazi debacle, the interests of the current administration are in tension with the folks hoping to be the next ones at bat. And that tension in the Epstein case is understandable because of the centrality of the issues of sex trafficking and pedophilia to the current Republican Party.
In the same way that the Iran-Contra scandal undercut a core strength of the Reagan administration — the release of the American hostages held in Tehran and a we-don’t-negotiate-with-terrorists attitude — Trump’s very shady behavior around the Epstein case hits hard for a movement that celebrated “Sound of Freedom” and frequently labels political enemies as “groomers.”
I will still be sparing in the use of the Epstein air horn, but one gets the feeling that it’s going to have to stay out on the counter for a good while longer.
