THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT - THE EPSTEIN PROBLEM

- Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Donald Trump's political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the President seriously, but not literally. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020 election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, as he was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging—the White House likely assumed that the MAGAverse would simply move on, as it had so many times before. The surprise—one that, two weeks in, Trump has still not been able to quell—is that it didn't.

Squirming, the President has tried to dismiss the uproar (“Are people still talking about this guy?”) and to blame it, somehow, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the Democrats’ “new SCAM”). More unexpectedly, he has called those in his own base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid,” lamenting that “my PAST SUPPORTERS have bought into this ‘bullshit,’hook, line, and sinker.” But that has been just blood in the water, both to the Democrats who are now calling for the full release of the Epstein files and to the anonymous Republican strategists who have begun to warn of a drop in turnout in the midterms.