The latest revelations stand to further fracture a party that already splintered once this year over the so-called Epstein files — during a much less politically fraught moment.
Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news — and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the president.
Following a brutal week for President Donald Trump during which his party took a beating at the polls, the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of his beloved tariffs and Republicans continued to feud over accusations of antisemitism, the White House had hoped to take a victory lap on ending the 43-day government shutdown.
But on Wednesday, House Democrats released documents revealing that, in the words of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Trump “knew about the girls” the late convicted sex offender was trafficking, the latest blow to a White House already reeling from a series of setbacks in recent days.
One Trump ally said that the latest Epstein discourse has taken “things that are already complicated for the president and brings them to the surface.”
“It’s like adding salt to a dish — the flavors are already there, it just accentuates all of them,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive issue.
The fresh wave of chaos has knocked the administration on its heels. The president lashed out at Republicans on social media, some House Republicans are under pressure to withdraw from the effort to bring the matter to the floor and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the media.
“This is another distraction campaign by the Democrats and the liberal media, and it’s why I’m being asked questions about Epstein instead of the government reopening because of Republicans and President Trump,” Leavitt said during a Wednesday press briefing.
Privately, White House aides push back on the idea that this is a particularly bad moment for them or that they have suffered a string of defeats. They never expected to win last week’s elections and that it’s too early to judge the outcome of the tariff case, with justices lobbing tough questions at both sides, said a senior White House official. And they’re characterizing the latest Epstein document release as nothing more than “annoying.”
“I definitely would not say it’s been brutal,” said the senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking. “We are used to waking up every day and not knowing what that day will bring. That’s the nature of working in this job, and nobody tackles these things better than President Trump … We worked for a president who was indicted and almost killed, so almost nothing surprises anybody around here anymore.”
But the latest revelations stand to further fracture a party that already splintered once this year over the so-called Epstein files — during a much less politically fraught moment.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein allegations, and no evidence has suggested that Trump took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. The president also has maintained that he and Epstein had a falling out years ago.
The president, in a post on Truth Social, warned Republicans who are working with Democrats to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. A vote on the measure is expected to come to the floor the first week of December, if things go as expected.
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects. Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap,” Trump wrote. “There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”
But Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the co-sponsor of the bill with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), told reporters Wednesday he believed “40 to 50″ Republicans would join Democrats in supporting the bill in the House.
The turmoil echoes the morass the White House found itself in during the summer when high-profile MAGA figures including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) fueled a conflagration the White House spent weeks trying to put out after the Justice Department released a memo saying that no files from the Epstein investigation would be made public.
But now, the president is grappling with an economic and foreign policy agenda that stands to be entirely upended. He is confronted with a public that does not believe he has improved their financial situations, the issue on which many of them voted to elect him. And his party is deeply divided over what to do with Carlson’s podcast interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes — and the defense of it from the leader of the storied Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“Listen, this is the NFL. When you’re the president of the United States, you take it as it comes,” said David Urban, a former senior Trump adviser. “There are global conflicts that show up on your plate. There’s tumult and controversy in America every day. It comes with the job.”
The Epstein discourse has had little impact on Trump’s poll numbers, and appears to remain a mostly niche conversation on the right while the broader electorate is concerned about more bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living. But amid a fracturing of the GOP coalition, some Trump allies fear people with ulterior motives are using the Epstein conversation for political gain.
“On the right, has his approval rating gone down? I mean, there’s been a bunch of this Epstein shit that’s been happening. Has his general right-wing approval rating gone down? No. It’s actually higher than it was when the Epstein stuff broke,” the Trump ally said. “So I think a lot of this is online chatter, and it’s really being fostered by people who wish to undermine his power, and think they’re doing so by talking about Epstein.”
But the four Republicans who have signed onto a petition to bring the matter to the House floor say what they’re pushing for is accountability. The measure, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, would require the Justice Department to turn over nearly all of the information in its possession around Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her part in the sex trafficking scheme, within 30 days.
“I’m certain the House vote will succeed,” Massie recently told POLITICO. “Some Republican members who are not signers of the petition have told me they will vote for the measure when the vote is called. I suspect there will be many more.”
Still, the White House is trying to prevent that from happening, waging a pressure campaign to get at least one of three House Republican women who have signed onto the petition to remove their name.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer in July warned that the Epstein scandal would “consume” Trump’s presidency. In an interview Wednesday, she said she’s been proven right.
“Not because it’s an actual scandal,” she added. “What I said, when I said that it was going to consume his presidency, is that the Democrats were not going to allow for President Trump to have a successful term.”
“I don’t think that it’s consuming his presidency because he’s guilty, but I think that the Epstein files is the next Russia collusion hoax,” she added.