Trump’s Epstein Humiliation Grows

The president saw defeat and ran. But that doesn’t mean the fight over releasing the files is over.

Donald Trump is obsessed with the idea that his predecessor, Joe Biden, was so mentally incapacitated that he used an autopen to sign all his pardons and legislation. He not only put a picture of an autopen in place of Biden’s mug on his “Presidential Walk of Fame,” he makes the same joke about it to every journalist he brings to that colonnade outside the West Wing. So it was more than a bit juicy to see this AP report that the Justice Department “quietly corrected” pardons it had posted online “bearing identical copies of President Donald Trump’s signature.” DOJ called it a “technical error.” We call it delicious irony. Happy Monday.

(Shutterstock)

Retreat. RETREAT!!!

by William Kristol

At 9:15 p.m. ET yesterday, Donald Trump threw in the towel, writing on Truth Social: “The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE.”

This is, of course, a lie. Everything Trump did in recent months shows that he cared deeply about not releasing the Department of Justice’s Jeffrey Epstein files. I’m sure he still cares a lot. But he’s now recognized defeat, at least a temporary defeat. And so he’s changed his tune.

It’s worth recalling how consistently and how insistently Trump fought the release of these files. In early July, his Attorney General and FBI Director announced they’d completed an “exhaustive review” of the files, after which they informed Trump of what he surely wanted to hear—that they had “found no basis to revisit the disclosure” of any of the Epstein materials.

Ever since, Trump has attacked those who called for the files’ release. Most notably, he tried to pressure the four Republican signers of the discharge petition to force a floor vote on the legislation mandating their release. This culminated in the remarkable spectacle of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert being summoned to the White House Situation Room last Wednesday to meet with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to get her arm twisted. But the four Republican holdouts—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina—held firm.

Meanwhile Trump’s lapdog, Speaker Mike Johnson, sent the House home early in late July to stop a growing Republican revolt on Epstein. He then kept the House out of session during the government shutdown, in part to avoid having to swear in the newly-elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who would be the decisive 218th signatory of the discharge petition. But the shutdown ended, the House came back, and on Wednesday Grijalva was sworn in. She went straight to the well of the House to provide the signature needed to bring the petition to the floor.

Meanwhile, in the course of the last four-and-a-half months, we learned more about why Trump cared about information coming out on his relationship with Epstein. The revelations ranged from the salacious card in Epstein’s birthday book to the recently released 2019 email from Epstein, in which he writes that “of course [Trump] knew about the girls.” What’s striking is that none of these revelations led Trump to make the judgment: Well, the worst is already out there, so I might as well order the files’ release. So one has to suspect that Trump thought or knew that there would be even worse to come from the release of the Justice Department files. And one has to suspect that’s why he fought it.

But as House Republicans prepared to desert en masse, Trump last night acknowledged defeat. The House will pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, likely tomorrow. The Senate will very likely follow suit quickly now that Trump has backed down. We will then see if Trump will sign the measure.

Of course, were he to sign it, Trump, along with Bondi and Patel, would no doubt work on minimizing the scale of the defeat. The Justice Department could withhold materials and limit the scope of the release of the files. And it will be hard to know what isn’t being released.

So this fight is by no means over. Democrats and the truth-seeking Republicans will have to keep the pressure on—by cross-checking the files that are released with what survivors and others know to be in them, by insisting on a full accounting of what hasn’t been released, by demanding hearings and testimony from Bondi and Patel under oath, and the like. And this is to say nothing of the fact that various documents and records might have conveniently gone missing in the course of Bondi and Patel’s exhaustive review.

Given how hard Trump has fought the release, it would be very foolish to assume that all will go smoothly now. There is material in there that Trump did not want us to see and still does not want us to see. So this is nowhere close to the end. It is merely the end of the beginning of the fight for full release of the Epstein files.

But we can draw lessons from this still incomplete and uncertain victory.

1) It was easier in this case to fracture the MAGA coalition than to get “responsible” Republicans to defect from Trump. The four Republicans who signed the discharge petition are not Republican “moderates” or “institutionalists.” Greene and Boebert are true believers. Many of their beliefs are foolish or deplorable. But they showed far more courage or at least stubbornness than all their more mainstream counterparts who have proved to be weaklings under pressure.

So: It may be more fruitful in the effort to weaken Trump to find and exploit fractures in the MAGA coalition than to try to find moderates to step up.

2) The four Republicans who held firm deserve a lot of credit. But they only were able to make a difference because the entire Democratic conference signed the discharge petition. And the entire conference signed up because some—mainly California’s Rep. Ro Khanna—insisted on seizing the issue.

I’m sure that Khanna and others were constantly being told by Democratic “strategists” not to let Epstein “distract” from the focus on “kitchen table” issues. I can’t even count how many meetings and conferences I’ve been at over the past months at which the Epstein issue was either downplayed or ignored, as Democratic consultants went over their polling data on health care. When some of us would politely—or sometimes not so politely!—point out that releasing the Epstein files polled even better than saving Medicaid, we were pretty much ignored. And we were sometimes privately reprimanded for indulging in this distraction.

We were also reminded time and again that Democrats are in the minority, and that it was important to stress to their supporters the limits of what they could do. But it turns out that Democrats are not powerless! They can sometimes make a difference. There are some levers of power—such as discharge petitions!—that are available. One has to pull on all those levers, and one often doesn’t know ahead of time which one might work.

So: Democrats should ignore much of the advice of the Democratic consultant-pollster-industrial complex. And in general, fighting is superior to finding reasons not to fight. You don’t score any goals if you don’t take any shots, even if they seem at first like long shots.

3) Finally, what we’ve already seen of the Epstein emails offers a remarkable window into the bipartisan decadence and depravity of many of our elites. Democrats should run against not just Trump and the GOP, but against elites in general in 2026, and I dare say in 2028.

So: For those of us who’d prefer centrist policies to leftist ones, we need centrist candidates that are also credibly anti-elitist. There will be no market for a return to the good old days of the Clintons and their like. Not when they can be found next to Trump in the Epstein files canon.

We shouldn’t overstate this moment. There are many, many challenges ahead on every front. Indeed, the chances of an intensification of the Trump administration’s authoritarianism at home and abroad may have increased because of Trump’s forced retreat on the Epstein files.

Ten months into Trump’s second term, we are nowhere near turning the corner in the fight against Trump and Trumpism. But that turning point may, just may, be coming into sight.

Join Sarah and JVL TONIGHT at 8:30 p.m. ET for our second Founders Town Hall of 2025. Leave your questions here. Location details will be emailed to founding members this afternoon. A replay will be available for those who cannot join live. Upgrade your membership today to help fuel our growth and get access to the event.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Republican Attack on Public Education… NANCY CLAIR writes on the dismantling of the Department of Education and how taxpayer dollars are now pouring into private schools.

• Trump Tells Voters: Don’t Believe Your Lying Wallets… From elections to the economy, he keeps denying reality, observes WILL SALETAN.

• Can Taiwan Trust the United States? On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN welcomes MICHAEL HUNZEKER, co-author of America’s Taiwan Dilemma, to discuss why credibility matters for U.S. deterrence and alliances in East Asia and how the Trump administration is reshaping America’s alliance system.

• Inside Mamdani’s Viral Video Team… The creators of his wildly successful digital campaign tell LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition how they found their winning formula.

• “I Hate It, But Newsom is Right About Redistricting”... On How to Fix It, ADAM KINZINGER joins JOHN AVLON to talk about the Epstein emails, Trump’s pardon spree, the collapse of Congress’s independence, and why redistricting is turning into a political arms race.

• This May Be the Cruelest, Most Senseless Thing Trump Has Done… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN has a conversation with Atul Gawande about the human toll of the dismantling of U.S. foreign aid.

---

Quick Hits

WHAT’S A LITTLE SWATTING BETWEEN FRIENDS?: What do Greg Goode, an Indiana state senator, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, have in common? They are both Republicans, they were both targeted by Trump over the weekend, and hours later, they both found themselves on the receiving end of what they described as malicious threats.

Early Sunday, the president took to Truth Social to excoriate Goode for not backing his very red state’s redistricting effort, an effort that the White House has pushed but that now appears to be stalled. Later that evening, Goode—who, as Politico’s Adam Wren notes, hasn’t actually taken a public position on redistricting—said his home had been swatted.

Around that time, Trump was also once again unloading on Greene, whom he unendorsed on Friday over her growing criticism of his conduct. Calling her a “traitor,” Trump scoffed at the idea—as Greene has asserted—that she was being put in physical danger because he had put her in his political crosshairs. “I don’t think her life is in danger. Frankly, I don’t think anybody cares about her,” Trump told reporters. On Sunday evening, Greene said that hoax pizza deliveries had started showing up at her home.

Will this bother Trump or allied Republicans, who spent weeks bemoaning the threatening nature of political discourse after the assassination of Charlie Kirk? Don’t bet on it. Disavowals of political violence tend to move in one direction with this administration. After all, just days prior to all this, Trump issued a pardon for Suzanne Kaye, who had been sentenced for threatening to shoot FBI agents trying to interview her about her actions on January 6th.

---

ICE ICE SHADY: Fresh off of turning Chicago into a potpourri of civil liberty violations and civic unrest, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agencies have their sights set on new cities. Top among them is Charlotte, North Carolina. And it’s going just about as inhumanely as you’d expect. Here is a dispatch from the Charlotte Observer:

Congregants of an east Charlotte church scattered into the woods Saturday when masked federal agents arrived and detained one of their members, according to witnesses.

About 15 to 20 church members were doing yard work on the property off Albemarle Road while their children played games and their spouses cooked meals. Agents parked just outside a closed gate leading to the church parking lot and ran into the yard, said the pastor, who did not want to identify himself or his church.

The agents asked no questions and showed no identification before taking one man away, whose wife and child were inside at the time, the pastor said. They attempted to grab others, too. . . .

Inside the church, women and children sobbed as they wondered whether their loved ones had been taken. Some yard workers fled into the surrounding woods when officials arrived, including 15-year-old Miguel Vazquez.

Just to recap: Immigration agents went after members of a church where children were playing; they showed no ID, chased congregants into the woods, and left women sobbing. We’re sure that DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin will have some post on Monday about how all these folks were actually the offspring of a weird romantic fling between Tren de Aragua gang members and ISIS operatives. But obviously there are less cruel, more humane ways to do this.

As a side note, it appears protesters got the heads up and ran to the woods to confront ICE agents with, among other things, deafening whistles. ICE responded by threatening to throw gas canisters at them, according to a video of the confrontation.

---

TUCKER? I BARELY KNOW HER!: Donald Trump finally was forced to weigh in on the MAGA civil war over the groypers and their place within the party. And he took a decidedly soft-touch approach. Was he bothered that Tucker Carlson platformed raging antisemite Nick Fuentes? Not really.

“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said.

Wait, Trump doesn’t know much about Fuentes? Didn’t he have dinner with him during the campaign? “Kanye asked if he could have dinner and he brought Nick. I didn’t know Nick at the time,” Trump added. “Meeting people, talking to people—for somebody like Tucker, that’s what they do. People are controversial. Some are, some aren’t.”

It’s hard for us to expect more from Trump than this. After all, this is the guy who couldn’t bring himself to disavow the Proud Boys. But Trump’s remark also sends a signal to folks engaged in this internal MAGA showdown that they don’t have to treat Fuentes as a cancer on the movement after all.

---

Cheap Shots