By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein increasingly feels more
like a simulacrum of a political scandal than an actual scandal.
On the one hand, in demanding that the government release
its Epstein files, the president’s critics are pretending to trust that Pam
Bondi’s Justice Department will comply in good faith by handing over everything
it has, including material that might incriminate Donald Trump.
They don’t really believe that, though. For 10 years,
their core critique of Trumpism has been that it exalts blind loyalty to an
autocrat over competing civic priorities like compliance with the law. It’s
unimaginable to them, and to me, that a Trumpified DOJ would be forthcoming
with what it knows about Epstein if doing so meant burning its own boss to the
ground. Postliberalism is designed to protect the man in charge in situations
like this one.
And so badgering Trump and Bondi to release the files
isn’t an earnest attempt to expose the president, which the administration
would never allow. It’s a way to keep the political heat on him for as long as
possible and to relish his
obvious distress.
Meanwhile, the administration has begun to go through the
motions of getting to the truth about Epstein. But it isn’t serious, and it
isn’t trying very hard to disguise its unseriousness. It too is pretending, and
is doing so in such an obvious way that even normally dependable Trump allies
can’t help but roll their eyes.
Take Alan Dershowitz, who dismissed the president’s order
to unseal grand jury testimony about Epstein as plainly
insufficient. Or listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene (for once, and never
again). “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” she warned the
administration on Monday. Trump supporters “want the whole steak dinner and
will accept nothing else.”
On Tuesday, the White House responded by dangling another
bit of red meat.
“Justice demands courage,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche
declared in a social media post. “For the first time, the Department of
Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know? At [Pam
Bondi’s] direction, I’ve contacted her counsel. I intend to meet with her soon.
No one is above the law—and no lead is off-limits.”
That’s three flavors of absurd. It’s absurd that federal
prosecutors haven’t sought to debrief Jeffrey Epstein’s chief accomplice until
the year of our lord 2025. It’s absurd that Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal
attorney, would insist on meeting with her himself instead of trusting the
assignment to deputies. And it’s absurd that he would stress that “no one is
above the law—and no lead is off-limits” when we all, and I do mean all,
know how this will end.
Donald Trump is going to let Ghislaine Maxwell out of
prison early in exchange for absolving him of wrongdoing related to Epstein.
What will his fans say when he does?
Equilibrium.
It’s not innate pessimism that’s led me to doubt
that the Epstein kerfuffle has legs. It’s my sense that this scandal has
already reached a state of political equilibrium. There realistically isn’t
much that could happen from this point on to sharply alter opinion on either
side.
If I’m right that a government led by postliberals will
never incriminate its own leader, then we’re headed for some sequence of events
that ends with the president being “exonerated.” The DOJ will eventually
release some or all of its files; when it does, nothing within will implicate
Trump. MAGA will claim that as vindication, forgetting that the reason they
wanted to see the files in the first place was to prove Democrats’ guilt, not
their own guy’s innocence. Anti-Trumpers will sneer that conspiracy-brained
populists were suckered by a cover-up that played out right under their noses.
In fact, this may be a case where opinion proves to be
more uniform among anti-Trumpers than among Trump cultists. Ask the latter why
they think House Republicans preferred to shut
down the chamber until September rather than vote on releasing the Epstein
files and you might get a few different theories. Ask the former and you’ll
get only one: “They’re buying time for Trump and Bondi to destroy evidence.”
Accusations about a conspiracy have already been
formalized by Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. Last week, he claimed
that his staff had heard that the FBI was tasked in March with reviewing
100,000 records related to Epstein and that, supposedly, “personnel were
instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.” Had
an allegation like that been made in 2017, when Christopher Wray was running
the bureau, it would have been pure
Resistance fanfic. In 2025, with Kash Patel in charge, it’s anyone’s guess.
I myself theorized
four days ago that Team Maxwell had leaked the “bawdy” 2003 letter
(allegedly) from Trump to
the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of pressuring the president to
make a deal with her. Lo and behold, today we find that the deputy attorney
general wants to meet her. After six months of watching how postliberals
operate, we’re all
conspiracy theorists now. Take one look at this
and try to imagine trusting this administration to behave on the up-and-up.
You can see what I mean by “equilibrium,” though. Trump’s
government will eventually declare him innocent in the Epstein matter,
Trumpists will seize that as a lifeline that justifies their continued
allegiance to him, and anti-Trumpers will scoff at the most brazenly corrupt
cover-up yet. It’s all straightforward from here.
Unless, perhaps, Ghislaine Maxwell ends up being set
free.
Quid pro quo.
If you believe Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, she’s looking
forward to it.
In this case, “Murdoch’s newspaper” refers to the New
York Post rather than the Journal, which dropped last week’s Epstein
bombshell. On Saturday, the Post published
a story citing a source at the Florida prison where Maxwell is incarcerated
who claims that she’s always viewed a Trump restoration as her salvation.
“Max was very into her appeal,” the
source at FCI Tallahassee said. “That was the biggest thing that was always
happening.
“Before, she would tell everybody
that she was waiting for Donald Trump to be reelected and become president,
that things were going to be different then.
“Max was quite confident that
things were going to change with her case.
“Freedom is 100% her focus,” the
source added. “She says, ‘I will not be here in 20 years.’”
If I supported a politician whose return to power was
seen as a ticket out of prison by an infamous pedophile’s pimp, I’d do some
soul-searching. But I digress.
For a few reasons, Maxwell’s role in this drama
complicates things for MAGA diehards. To start with, they view her (correctly,
of course) as a villain. And Trump has never pardoned someone whom populists
regard as a villain.
Most of his acts of clemency have been reserved for those
celebrated by the right as deserving
toadies, political martyrs, or both, as in the case of the January 6
defendants. Freeing Maxwell would be harder for them to compute, even with
former Epstein pals like Dershowitz preparing the ground by telling sob stories
in right-wing media about how
supposedly unfair her sentence is. MAGA hasn’t been conditioned to believe
that Maxwell is a victim of some traditional enemy like Democrats, the media,
or “the deep state.” If the president springs her, it’ll look to them—and
everyone else on Earth—like he did so to buy her silence about his history with
Epstein.
Which brings us to another problem. Her incentives are so
obviously aligned with Trump’s that his supporters will struggle to rationalize
believing her when she absolves him.
He’s the only elected official in America who has the
ability to free her before she’s served her sentence. A senior White House
official assured the Post that “there have been no discussions or
consideration of a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, and there never will be,” but
that’s a red herring. Trump doesn’t need to grant her a full pardon to let her
out. He could commute her sentence to time served, as he did with the
most violent January 6 offenders, or he could order the Justice Department
to drop its opposition to her
appeal before the Supreme Court.
Election Day 2024 functionally transformed Ghislaine
Maxwell from an actual prisoner into a political prisoner. Before November 5 of
last year, she was behind bars to pay for her crimes. Since November 5, she’s
been behind bars because the moment hasn’t yet arrived for her to make herself
useful to the ruling strongman. That’s what it means to have a president who
treats law enforcement as a form of leverage over enemies. Maxwell’s freedom
now depends on proving that she’s Donald Trump’s friend, not his enemy, and an
ideal opportunity has presented itself.
If she testifies that the president is blameless in
Epstein’s crimes and he contrives a way to free her, not even Trumpers will be
able to shut their eyes tightly enough to miss the bribery playing out in front
of them. For years, they’ve resisted the accusation that their hero is soulless
and transactional, forever on the lookout for a quid
pro quo he can extract from someone who needs something from him. For him
to prove it by cutting a break to Jeffrey Epstein’s procurer, of all people,
would be a gut check.
It’s the one thing I can think of that might stink so
intensely as to disrupt the equilibrium and send right-wing opinion moving
toward the left’s theory of a cover-up. So why is Todd Blanche preparing to
meet with her?
Implausible deniability.
The answer, I think, is that the White House is making a
wager.
A lot of wagers are being made around the Epstein files.
Democrats who are now calling for the material to be released are wagering that
it will hurt Republicans more than it’ll hurt them. MAGA fundamentalists like
Greene, who are undercutting Trump by demanding to see the files, are wagering
that the conspiratorial right-wing base will side with them against the
president.
Trump, Bondi, and Blanche are wagering that Trump’s
supporters will treat his exoneration by Ghislaine Maxwell as an excuse to lose
interest in the Epstein saga—even if he turns around and commutes her sentence
afterward, all but confirming a corrupt bargain. I would wager that they’re
correct.
That’s not because populists are too dumb to suss out the
obvious bribery involved. It’s because the Trump White House takes what we
might call a postmodern approach to political scandal.
Traditionally, a politician looking to wriggle his way
out of a scandal would try to convince the public that it isn’t true. There are
elements of that in how the president has handled the scoop about the letter he
supposedly sent to Epstein years ago. I never “wrote a picture” in my life, he
told the Journal, falsely. They
didn’t so much as show us a copy of the letter before they went to press, J.D.
Vance complained.
The White House was trying to create earnest doubt about the story’s veracity.
But sometimes Trump’s damage control efforts are less
about shaping opinion by seeding doubt than about creating a pretext for his
supporters to feign doubt because it would be politically useful for
him—and for them—to do so. That’s what happened last week when he began
screeching that the DOJ’s Epstein material is a
“hoax” created by Democrats, contradicting years of populist lore about
what those files contain. I’d call it a silly argument, but it wasn’t an
argument at all. It was an assertion.
The term “implausible deniability” jumps to mind. He
wasn’t asking his fans to believe that the Epstein files are a hoax. He was
asking them to say it.
That’s the postmodern part. Instead of using PR channels
to convince the right that something is or isn’t true, he was inviting the
right to lay the question of truth aside and behave as a PR channel itself.
Right-wing voters aren’t an audience that his team needs to persuade—they are
the team.
They can believe whatever they like about him and Jeffrey
Epstein, but as with any PR outfit, Trump expects them to protect his interests
when information warfare is being waged. His enemies want to see the Epstein
files, so his friends must insist otherwise. Every politically engaged American
with a social media account in 2025 is a flack to some degree, each a potential
Steven Cheung or Karoline Leavitt in their own little sphere. Trump has taken
that to its logical conclusion by asking his fans to behave accordingly. All
they have to do is their part.
And so the White House is wagering that if he frees
Maxwell in return for favorable testimony from her about Epstein, his flacks
will swallow their doubts and carry forth the message of “TOTAL VINDICATION!”
that inevitably follows from the president and his deputies. “The Epstein
cover-up will be an indicator of how far we are down the road to
authoritarianism,” Bill Kristol argued
today at The Bulwark. “The success of such a cover-up would take us
much further down that road.” That’s right, and those are the terms in which
the president would like his fans to view this dispute. It’s not about Epstein,
it’s about whether his base will prioritize his impunity over something that’s
been a priority for them for a long time.
They don’t need to believe that Maxwell is telling the
truth in exonerating him; they just need to believe that what’s true and what
isn’t matters less than protecting him does.
I presume Todd Blanche is on his way to meet Maxwell with
an offer in hand. If the Supreme Court doesn’t set her free on appeal, the
president will—provided that she vouches for his innocence in the Epstein
matter. He might not free her immediately lest the “quid” and “quo” look more
flagrant than they already do, but he will in a year or so when the public has
lost interest. There’s no other way this can end, I think, just as there’s no
way the Jerome Powell saga can end without
Powell being fired. Character is destiny, for the right as much as it is
for Trump.
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