But regardless of how it shakes out, the drama around the files has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility within the MAGA movement in a way few, if any, things have before. And it has proved a massive unforced political error by Trump.
The man who has for a decade dominated his base and told it what to care about has backed down when that base decided its priorities didn’t align with his own.
That’s a remarkable political moment – and an unfortuitous one for Trump, particularly right now.
The reversal, and where it leaves us
The big news overnight was that Trump seemed to relent after months of fighting an effort in the House to force the release of all Epstein files from the Justice Department. A significant number of Republicans had been expected to defect from Trump’s opposition to releasing the files in this week’s vote.
The first thing to note is that this isn’t the end of the matter.
For one, Trump has a way of changing his mind. For two, the bill would still need to pass in the Senate – where Majority Leader John Thune was noncommittal on Monday – and be signed by Trump, though it’s hard to see how the president and Senate Republicans could resist those things now.
And lastly, the investigations Trump ordered last week of political foes tied to Epstein could seemingly give the Justice Department a pretext not to release all the files.
Still, Trump’s reversal is a significant moment politically, because it suggests he is throwing in the towel on something he’s fought for months.
While he cast his new posture as being in line with his prior comments on the matter, it’s a clear capitulation.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have fought tooth and nail against the discharge petition that ultimately forced this vote. Trump last week threatened Republicans who signed on to it, calling them “stupid” and accusing them of playing into Democrats’ hands.
The Epstein files were the central issue in Trump’s recent rift with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. And it’s possible he was about to see 100 or more Republicans bucking him on it in the House, according to estimates in recent days.
For once, Trump succumbed to his own base
Trump will likely pretend this wasn’t a rebuke of him personally. But it was. And it’s a pretty remarkable one at that.
Over the past decade, he has fashioned a Republican Party that was largely about one thing: Trump.
Whatever he said, went. It didn’t matter if the idea flew in the face of decades of conservative orthodoxy. It didn’t matter what Republican lawmakers previously espoused.
It didn’t matter if Trump seemed to be making it up on the fly or breaking the law in the process. It didn’t matter if he was basing the policy on a series of fabrications. The unquestioning faith he garnered from his base was immense.
Congressional Republicans have rarely voted against Trump’s position; when they have, it’s almost always been on foreign policy matters.
But the Epstein files saga has shown that the base’s willingness to abide Trump has its limits – or at least, it does when the base feels strongly enough and when the president’s political capital starts to wane.
What it portends for Trump
That’s what’s particularly inauspicious for the president right now. It isn’t just his retreat, but the circumstances and timing of it.
Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and there was no smoking gun in the thousands of documents released last week from the Epstein estate.
But there’s no question that the revelations – about what Trump knew about the convicted sex offender and when – have been bad for him politically. Those include emails in which Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls” Ghislaine Maxwell recruited from Mar-a-Lago, and that Trump spent hours with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre at Epstein’s house.
Despite this looking bad for Trump, many congressional Republicans had apparently decided releasing the full files from the DOJ simply wasn’t something they could vote against. Unlike so many other things, they couldn’t ignore what their base has long been clamouring for in the service of Trump’s agenda.
And perhaps most important about Trump’s capitulation, politically speaking, is the timing. It’s a sign of weakness at a very bad time.
That base is arguing over how hard to root out the growing racism and antisemitism in its ranks. Some elements are expressing unease with how truly “America First” some facets of Trump’s agenda are – things like bailing out Argentina and threatening to go to war with Venezuela. Others are concerned about how cosy Trump has been with Big Tech.
And the Greene episode has proved a bigger headache for Trump than perhaps anyone anticipated. That’s in large part because, unlike the many moderate Republicans who have bucked him in the past, the Georgia Republican is hitting back against him rather than objecting and meekly fading away. She’s also doing so from a position of credibility with the base.
Over the weekend we saw a number of prominent MAGA and MAGA-adjacent influencers on social media start to distance themselves from Trump’s agenda.
Greene seems in some ways to be giving portions of the MAGA base the permission structure to more forcefully object to things they were previously quietly uneasy about.
And, perhaps not coincidentally, this is also playing out at a time when Trump’s political capital is at a low point.
Republican losses on Election Day this month reinforced Trump’s looming lame-duck status and crystallised the GOP’s very real problems in a post-Trump political world, given the party almost always loses when he’s not on the ballot.
Given all of that, it shouldn’t be too surprising that some Republicans are trying to figure out what the next chapter looks like and perhaps turn the page on Trump in certain ways.
As these numbers show, Trump put congressional Republicans in an impossible position by asking them to toe his line. But it’s still significant that so many of them, for once, actually forced his hand.
