The Epstein Election

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

It’s a distant memory now, but the president spent a meaningful part of the summer of 2025 reprising the scene from The Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen tries to do crowd control in front of an exploding fireworks factory. Nothing to see here. Please disperse.

 

“Nothing to see here” doesn’t work when thousands of skyrockets are going off while men leap from third-story windows. And it doesn’t work for the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, whose contents hold roughly the same mystique for American populists as the contents of the title object did for the audience at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

(Can you tell from my film touchstones that I’m Gen X?)

 

I thought “nothing to see here” would work for Donald Trump, though.

 

I said so in a newsletter published on July 18 of last year, after the Wall Street Journal revealed that the president had (allegedly!) sent Epstein a birthday message in 2003 alluding to “certain things in common” that the two men shared and hoping that each new day would continue to be “a wonderful secret” for his friend. The text of the note was “framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” the Journal noted.

 

Days earlier, with rumors of an impending revelation swirling, Trump warned in a post on Truth Social that no true fan of his would be suckered by “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” perpetrated by Democrats and the liberal press. He went as far as to say of right-wingers who remained credulous about it, “I don’t want their support anymore!” Nothing to see here.

 

Surely his followers would obey his commands. Don’t they always? “The Journal’s bombshell is effectively, and ironically, the end of the scandal as a political threat to Trump rather than the start,” I predicted at the time. “MAGA simply lacks the civic integrity to keep pursuing the truth about Epstein now that it’s been transformed, stupidly and cynically, into a referendum on the media.”

 

Was I wrong? Maggie Haberman seems to think I was wrong.

 

The New York Times reporter claimed recently that, in fact, Trump’s Naked Gun reaction to the Epstein files was a turning point in his second term. “That was when, according to his own top allies and advisers, that was when they could start seeing his own base stop believing him quite as much,” she told an audience in Austin, Texas. “It was the first time that [fellow Times reporter and co-author] Jonathan [Swan] and I could recall, and we’ve read about this, Trump saying, ‘Believe me, not what you’re hearing over there’—and it didn’t work.”

 

In Raiders, the villains’ faces melted when they opened the ark. In the Trump analog as told by Haberman, the villain’s face began to melt politically when he refused to open it.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, I think there may be something to that. If right-wing turnout ends up lagging this fall, Epstein might be an underrated factor.

 

The crack in the dam.

 

I continue to doubt that Trump’s self-serving skepticism about an Epstein conspiracy has cost him many votes directly. The polls don’t support it either: If his stonewalling on the DOJ’s files last July had angered populists, one would think, we should have seen his job approval numbers drop afterward.

 

We didn’t. His net approval was flat for two full months after Epstein mania broke big in July 2025.

 

If there is (or was) an Epstein backlash on the right, I’d also expect to see it hit so-called MAGA Republicans especially hard, as they’re the most ardently populist wing of the GOP. Reagan conservatives might be interested in the Epstein matter, but MAGA types are invested in it.

 

The evidence isn’t strong there either, though. Self-identified MAGA Republicans have remained vastly more loyal to the president this year than non-MAGA Republicans have. And while there’s reason to believe that some MAGA Republicans are shifting into the non-MAGA column, raising the possibility that they’ve been alienated by the Epstein saga, there’s also some reason to doubt it.

 

On the other hand.

 

A Change Research poll published this year found public credulity about an Epstein cover-up to be widespread and bipartisan. Among Republicans, 57 percent said they suspect the government is keeping information about the late pedophile secret, and 17 percent said they believe the cover-up is aimed at concealing “significant” material in the files about Trump. Another 14 percent answered “not sure” when asked about that—meaning that nearly a third of the president’s own party isn’t giving him the usual benefit of the doubt in this matter.

 

Forget Republicans, though. Among independents, a group whom Trump came within 3 points of winning in 2024, opinion on Epstein is radioactive. Fully 81 percent think the government is hiding things about him, and 66 percent(!) suspect that “significant” information about the president has something to do with the reason why.

 

In an America where there’s no war in the Middle East and inflation is at 2 percent, none of that would matter in November. Only the most committed cranks would vote against the ruling party at a moment when things are going well economically and overseas because they’re mad that Trump didn’t open the Epstein ark for them.

 

But in an America where we’re stuck in another “forever war” and diesel is $6.50 per gallon, the Epstein disappointment may have been just the trick that granted certain disaffected Trumpy populists psychological “permission” to break with him without feeling like traitors by doing so.

 

Absent that disappointment they may have felt obliged to stick with the president on matters like Iran, reluctant to betray him by siding with the hated left. But the fact that he crossed them on Epstein last year has given them a face-saving way to express their broader disenchantment with his presidency: It was he who betrayed them by not eagerly exposing America’s pedophile class, a supreme populist priority, and so now they’re free to oppose him on anything they like. Including the war.

 

Politico published a case study in this phenomenon yesterday in a piece on buyer’s remorse among some of the “Front Row Joes,” aka MAGA fanatics who have attended dozens or hundreds of Trump rallies:

 

[Trisha] Hope saw her faith shaken during a July 8, 2025 Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked then-AG Pam Bondi about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Before she could answer, Trump interrupted: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”

 

“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope said. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”

 

The war with Iran vindicated those feelings. “He’s said the war is over 600 different times. He tells us they don’t have a military, they don’t have a navy. They’re still blowing up things. It’s just all lies.”

 

Another “Front Row Joe” who’s soured on Trump responded, “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me” when asked why.

 

Call it the “Marjorie Taylor Greene effect.” Greene has become a poisonous critic of the president since leaving Congress, particularly regarding Iran, but what opened an unbridgeable rift between the two was her pursuit of the Epstein files. For her and populists like Trisha Hope, it seems, their belief that Trump shared their commitment to exposing conspiracies involving predatory elites was a dam that restrained their misgivings about aspects of his behavior and policy agenda.

 

Then the dam failed. Now everything is rushing through, washing away their support. And the usual gimmicks aren’t strong enough to patch the crack.

 

‘The grand conspiracy.’

 

That may explain why the White House has resorted to some unusual gimmicks lately instead.

 

If it’s true that lagging enthusiasm among the right-wing base has something to do with unmet demand for conspiratorial revelations, we should expect Trump and his aides to try to increase the supply during the final weeks of the campaign. They may have begun: At The Bulwark yesterday, Will Sommer made the case that a bizarre clip posted over the weekend by top lackey Dan Scavino on social media was actually a tease aimed at QAnoners.

 

But that’s small potatoes compared with “the grand conspiracy” that the president’s law firm, the Justice Department, is working to expose.

 

The “grand conspiracy” probe is being run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami and intends to prove that “high-ranking officials from the Obama and Biden administrations engaged in a decades-long, ‘deep state’ conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights,” according to the Washington Post. It’s a sort of unified field theory of crankery about Democrats “weaponizing” the federal government, which is MAGA-speak for “investigating genuinely dubious behavior by Trump and his aides.”

 

The president has been let down before by cronies who, for ethical reasons, failed to deliver the sort of nakedly political prosecutions that he craves. But he took no chances with “the grand conspiracy,” bringing in a pair of celebrated 2020 election deniers to lead the probe. With former prosecutor Joe diGenova in charge and former White House aide Kurt Olsen by his side, the team has spent months digging for evidence of malfeasance by former CIA chief John Brennan, among others.

 

Trump may have disappointed his base by not revealing the “truth” about Epstein, but exposing the “grand conspiracy” would demonstrate that he still shares their priorities about wanting to hold conniving left-wing elites accountable. If the investigation snares enough of those elites, it might even patch the crack in the dam.

 

But it probably won’t, it turns out: Olsen resigned yesterday, and diGenova quit several weeks ago “amid disagreements over the pace of the investigation,” per the Washington Post. When pressed about the nature of those disagreements, diGenova told the paper vaguely that “time was needed to build those cases” and “people differ on how long that should take.” But he was more specific, and sterner, in a comment to the New York Post. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence,” he complained, “you have an ethical problem.”

 

He didn’t have the goods. His predecessor as lead prosecutor didn’t have the goods either; she was removed from the probe earlier this year because “she did not believe there was enough to make a case.” No fewer than seven attorneys involved have departed, according to Britain’s Daily Mail, because “Main Justice”—that is, Justice Department headquarters in Washington—won’t stop pressuring them to seek indictments despite the fact that evidence is thin and the charges are unlikely to produce convictions.

 

If that’s true, it means Attorney General Todd Blanche’s operation is so preposterously corrupt and politically compromised that even prominent “rigged election” truthers are having moral qualms about working for it.

 

One DOJ official gave away the game about “the grand conspiracy” when he told the Mail that “this case was initiated to make the president and the public think something is happening down there [in Miami], when in reality, it’s not.” It’s a political pageant being staged by Blanche and his cronies to excite demoralized Republicans (and Trump) before the election by harassing old nemeses like Brennan. They want indictments right away, whether or not there’s enough evidence to convict at trial, because this is about dangling “proof” of a conspiracy to goose right-wingers’ enthusiasm to vote, not about punishing anyone for actual crimes.

 

Which is some gimmick, no? Promising Americans $5,000 if they support your party is one thing, but hauling unconvictable people into court and putting them through the ordeal of a criminal trial because doing so might boost your party’s Election Day turnout is truly going the extra mile. Ultimately, Blanche’s department is searching for evidence of “weaponization” of government in the same way that J.D. Vance is searching for fraud: In both cases, they’re diverting public attention away from the most obvious culprits right in front of them by redirecting it toward conspiracies further afield.

 

I’m curious to see how the right will react if “the grand conspiracy” probe collapses under its own weight and the FBI’s investigation into 2020 ballot rigging, to which hundreds of agency employees have been assigned, fizzles out before Election Day. Epstein isn’t the only conspiracy disappointment that MAGA fans have endured, remember—the Durham investigation, which was Trump’s first stab at uncovering “deep state” malfeasance in the Russiagate investigation, was also a dud. And while Blanche’s DOJ has done its postliberal best to indict the president’s enemies, the only scalp it’s actually taken was John Bolton’s.

 

That’s a lot of frustration for a vengeful movement of conspiracy addicts to have to swallow. And the president is short on excuses: He can claim with some justification that the behavior of Iran and global oil markets is beyond his control, but the behavior of the executive branch is very much within it. If he can’t produce the secret evidence that proves “the grand conspiracy,” and he won’t produce the secret evidence that proves the Epstein conspiracy, not much is left of the populist argument for electing him in 2016. He fought the swamp and the swamp won.

 

Except … he didn’t even fight it, did he? Maybe, as with the war, the truth about that will also start to rush forward through cracks in the dam caused by the right’s disappointment over Epstein and other conspiracies. A record-high share of the public now believes that the government is corrupt, topping the previous record by 10 points; tellingly, while the share of Democrats has surged since 2024, the share of Republicans has barely declined over the same period. Trump’s supporters know he’s corrupt, in other words, and they know it well enough that they can’t be bothered to pretend otherwise even when talking to pollsters.

 

The swamp won because Trump wanted it to win, those supporters might conclude—on war, on influence peddling, and on Jeffrey Epstein. If any meaningful part of the right ends up entertaining that possibility in November, the president and his party are cooked.