Face It, Epstein Has Blown Over

At NPR a week ago:

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California is condemning House Speaker Mike Johnson for sending members home early for a month-long recess to stop a bipartisan push to release records tied to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

"He has stopped Congress and all of the business of this week because he doesn't want to have a vote," Khanna told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday. "He knows he would lose the vote."

The resolution, introduced with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, calls for the release of federal interview memos and evidence identifying "who all was involved in the sex trafficking that Epstein led," Khanna told NPR. It has gained traction in both parties, despite resistance from House GOP leadership.

At Poynter:

The week before last, I told a reporter who is pretty plugged into the Washington political scene that I thought this whole President Donald Trump-Jeffrey Epstein story would eventually peter out. New reporting on Trump-Epstein would be sparse, other stories would dominate the news cycle and the Epstein stuff would fade away just like every controversial story in the Trump universe does.

“I don’t think so,” this reporter told me. “I think this story is going to stick for a while.”

The reporter was right. I was wrong. This Epstein story isn’t going anywhere. And Trump seems extremely bothered by it, which is a story itself.

Nevertheless, Ed Kigore at New York Magazine is correct:

It has become an iron tenet of contemporary politics that developments that would massively affect the standing in public opinion of most politicians have little or no effect, positively or negatively, on Donald Trump. He’s the most galvanizing public figure in living memory, and his vast history of controversy and scandal appear to have made him as impervious to breaking news as a cockroach is impervious to radiation.

He links to Nate Silver, who makes a number of good points:

[Epstein is] an interesting test case precisely because there has been the wall-to-wall coverage of a negative story for Trump that liberals often clamor for. And yet, it’s hard to discern any major impact on his approval numbers.

Maybe that’s because, as Bryan Walsh writes at Vox, the Epstein story crowds out others that are more important and/or also potentially problematic for Trump. The constraints in news coverage aren’t what they used to be when most journalism is consumed online rather than in the print edition. . . . If they’re reading about Epstein, that means they’re not reading as much about other things. Epstein might be a bad story for Trump, but there are lots of bad stories for Trump. What is its value above a replacement-level day in the news cycle?

But over the past weekend, the big story was Trump's Scotland trip. The contrast with Biden's European trips a little over a year ago was unavoidable: European leaders had to shepherd Biden back to the group when he wandered away; for Trump, the leaders had to travel to see him at his personal facility and be told what their tariff rates would be. Trump gave interviews looking upbeat and tanned; Biden didn't give interviews at all. This came precisely as his critics like Bill Maher had to recalibrate on the tariff issue:

Comedian Bill Maher has shockingly admitted he was wrong about US President Donald Trump's use of tariffs.

Maher's admission during an episode of his 'Club Random' podcast on Monday, where he claimed he's "got to own it" as America's economy thrives.

"Just to take an example, tariffs. Now I remember that I, along with probably most people, was saying at the beginning, 'Oh, you know, by the 4th of July… the economy was going to be tanked by then,' and I was kind of like, 'Well, that seems right to me,'" he said.

"But that didn't happen. It could happen tomorrow. I'm just saying, that's reality, so let's work first from the reality of that, not from 'I just hate Donald Trump,' because that's boring and doesn't get us anywhere and leads you to dishonesty."

Ghislaine Maxwell's meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche late last week also seem to have reduced expectations that there would be much new in the case. Over ther past couple of weeks, Alan Dershowitz's views appear to have calmed speculation down:

As for the names in redacted files, Dershowitz says they are not world leaders like many believers of the conspiracies think.

“Because I was the lawyer and I did all the investigations, I know who all these people are. I could figure out, based on everything that I saw, who Mr. X is, Mr. Y is and Mr. Z,” he said.

“I can tell you right now, none of them are public figures who are currently in office. Some of them were previously in office. Some of them are dead, but there is no client list.”

Put another way, none of them is Donald Trump. Dershowitz also strongly implied that Maxwell would, if anything, add more credibility to his own version of the story:

“She knows everything. She is the Rosetta Stone. She knows everything. She arranged every single trip with everybody. She knows everything,” Dershowitz said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added he does not see any harm in offering Maxwell “use immunity” to talk freely about the Epstein case in testimony before Congress.

The lack of further quasi-bombshells like the Epstein birthday book, which seems overall not to have been any sort of game changer, has resulted in the story fading, while there have been continuing suggestions that more will come out over Russiagate, which is where public expectations have shifted.

In addition, the MAGA stalwarts like Mark Dice or Michael Lebron/Lionel who'd been insisting that the "files" be released have largely fallen silent on the issue. And as even left-leaning observers noted in the links above, what would destroy other political figures often just makes Trump stronger. Maybe the media is even starting to figure that out.