When House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed the press on Tuesday, you would have had no idea that, two weeks earlier, he had notched the biggest legislative accomplishment of his career. There was little talk of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a mammoth tax cut for the rich that will eliminate health care for millions of Americans. Instead, a visibly beleaguered Johnson said he was shutting down Congress for the summer, all but admitting that it was because Democrats kept calling votes to release files related to the late pedophilic financier Jeffrey Epstein—files that mention Donald Trump among many others, according to a Wednesday report from The Wall Street Journal.
“We want maximum transparency,” Johnson claimed. But then, in a lengthy, mealy-mouthed statement, he instead insisted he was delaying the release of the Epstein files to “protect victims” and pledged that he would not “play politics” over the issue, as his Democratic colleagues were. This is more than a bit rich. For years, Johnson’s Republican colleagues have been ignoring the humanity of those victims as they have spun elaborate, fanciful conspiracy theories about Epstein and his clients—many of whom were rumored to be powerful Democrats, including Bill Clinton, and Democrat-aligned figures. Now that the leader of the GOP was implicated, Johnson himself was playing politics by trying to shut down a story that in two short weeks has upended the ruling party.
The Epstein story is now bigger than the files—at least until we know everything that’s in them. It’s grinding Republican governance on Capitol Hill to a halt, and it’s dragging down the Trump administration. His approval rating is tanking, which is due to a combination of factors—including the backlash to the big budget bill, ICE’s immigration crackdown, and Trump’s tariff chaos—but the Epstein affair is playing a key role. There are signs, in opinion polls but also in the MAGA swamps online, that Trump’s hold on his base is slipping, which could have disastrous consequences for the GOP in the midterm elections. Trump could well be in a moment analogous to the one Joe Biden faced after the disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan—the start of a tailspin that he may never recover from.
The fault for Trump’s precipitous decline is his alone. It is Trump who ordered masked thugs into American cities and towns to hunt for any undocumented immigrant they could lay their hands on. It was Trump who forced Johnson to push through a flawed, deeply damaging bill that will have a catastrophic impact on health care and the economy. It was Trump whose moronic belief in the power of tariffs is currently causing the dollar to collapse and prices to skyrocket. And it was Trump who forced Johnson to shut down Congress so that Republicans wouldn’t have to vote on any more Democratic amendments that put them on the spot about releasing the Epstein files.
As I argued last week, there’s no way out for Trump now that he has declared the story a “hoax” and a witch hunt on par with “Russiagate.” He can continue to stonewall the release of the files, making himself look guiltier by the second—which is the approach that he has taken. Or he can release the files and cross his fingers. Even if the files reveal the bare minimum—i.e., what we already know, which is that Trump had a decade-plus friendship with Epstein, which included the period of time that Epstein was allegedly trafficking and raping dozens of young girls—there would be questions that Trump has refused to answer. Most importantly: What did he know about his good friend’s activities? The result is a cancer of a scandal, one that will continue to metastasize throughout his administration, the Republican Congress, and even his MAGA base.
It is also a gift to the Democrats, who are powerless in the minority and abject at messaging. They have thus far struggled to harness popular anger over the administration’s immigration policies, ruinous legislation, gutting of the federal government, and more. But the party has effectively weaponized Epstein, aided by popular interest and the fact that, well, the president certainly seems to be up to something shady.
House Democrats’ push to release the files was so successful that it caused Johnson to literally run away. He will presumably spend the summer recess thinking about how to respond to Democratic efforts to divide his caucus and push for the full release of the files, but it’s not clear that there is anything short of “full transparency” that can do that. He’s caught in a bind. At the same time, investigative efforts—particularly the House’s plan to subpoena the Department of Justice for its Epstein documents, and perhaps Senator Ron Wyden’s suggestion that the DOJ “follow the money” with Epstein—may very well be fruitful. The House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell may or may not be as fruitful, depending on what deals she makes before her testimony. (Regardless, it will continue to fuel interest in the story, even if it’s a dud—because if she doesn’t reveal anything it will be assumed that Trump’s allies at the DOJ got to her.) In any case, this is a huge story that will likely ensnare several powerful people and hold the public’s attention—and, in doing so, will serve as a continual reminder that the president of the United States was close friends with the twenty-first century’s most notorious pedophile.
For Democrats, the Epstein story does pose risks, as well, many of which should be familiar to anyone who remembers the long investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Here, as was true then, the most likely result is something that is damning but far less salacious than what is rumored. In 2016, it turned out that Trump was openly encouraging and attempting to benefit from Russian efforts to interfere in the election—but not that he was a compromised, blackmailed puppet of Vladimir Putin (or, for that matter, that he had paid Russian sex workers to pee on a bed Barack Obama had slept in). What we know about Trump is damning enough—being friends with Epstein is bad, and reporting suggests that he and others in Epstein’s orbit had a good enough understanding of what he was up to—even if no evidence emerges that he was one of his “clients,” which is not a revelation that Democrats should hold their breath for.
This story may resemble Russiagate in another way: It likely won’t end Trump’s presidency, and Democrats would be foolish to suggest that it will. But a precious gift has fallen in their lap: a scandal that’s very easy for voters to understand and extremely hard for Trump and the Republicans to make go away. May it undermine this fascist administration for years to come.
