It’s been two weeks since Team Trump prematurely began declaring victory in its efforts to quell the “MAGA rebellion” over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and this chapter of Donald Trump’s second presidency still has no end in sight.
The White House’s big plan to change the subject — by endorsing the idea of jailing Trump’s predecessor on manufactured claims — is doing next to nothing right now to dig the president out of this Epstein-shaped hole that he and his loyalists dug for themselves. And there are already concerns among certain Trump advisers that this gambit is creating, in the words of one such adviser, just another “ticking time bomb” that could blow up in their faces in the months and years to come.
In recent days, some senior administration officials continue to privately concede that the way Trump talks about the Epstein saga likely arouses more suspicion than it suppresses. This week, for instance, Trump said that he had a falling out with Epstein because the convicted sex offender and accused sex trafficker “stole” workers from him — including the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims. Behind closed doors, the president has lately expressed frustration at the Epstein debacle’s staying power in the day-to-day news cycles, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
Concurrently, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are keeping up the pressure on the Trump administration to release the so-called “Epstein Files” — which the president seems to have lied about being in. Recent polling data suggests that the Epstein scandal is breaking through to the American electorate and has indeed hurt Trump. On top of all that, he is now locked in a legal battle with one of his most crucial media allies, Fox News honcho Rupert Murdoch, all because of the Epstein affair. Further, the president’s recent moves caused Giuffre’s family to publicly press him “for answers.”
No matter the insistence coming from some of Trump’s top advocates that this president is out of the woods on this, he and his team have completely failed to move the country and the media off of a major news story at a time when the White House and Justice Department would prefer to talk about practically anything else. In one such vain attempt, the Trump administration has tried to refocus the public’s attention on his fascist impulses.
In Trump’s latest salvo in targeting his political enemies, the president and some of his most senior lieutenants, such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, have devoted considerable energy this month to pushing their woefully flimsy, Russiagate-related claims that former President Barack Obama committed treason and that he and other ex-officials should be prosecuted.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people — Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump claimed last week. He continued: “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“He’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Aside from the sitting president being the one who tried to steal an election he lost, the Trump administration has presented no actual evidence for their lofty allegations, and the reports they have declassified and released don’t at all reveal what his team is proclaiming they do. The smear — which some of the most powerful people in the world are now using the U.S. government and intelligence community to co-sign — is that then-President Obama and others personally concocted the Trump-Russia scandal near the end of Obama’s term, in order to sabotage the first Trump administration.
To underscore how much of the federal government is in lockstep in this latest ruse, Gabbard announced she made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, with CIA director John Ratcliffe declaring he “strongly” backs the Gabbard-led crusade to rewrite the Trump-Russia history and potentially imprison the president’s political foes.
“We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to investigate the criminal implications of this for the evidence,” Gabbard told reporters at the White House last week. Pressed on if she was referring specifically to Obama, she responded with the extraordinary claim: “Correct. The evidence that we have found, and that we have released, directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Rolling Stone called Michael van Landingham — one of the former intelligence analysts for the CIA who literally wrote the 2017 intelligence assessment on how the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump — and asked him if Obama concocted all of this. The former analyst audibly laughed for a few seconds.
“No, not at all,” he says. “Neither did [John] Brennan and neither did [James] Comey and neither did James Clapper.” He adds: “No one ever gave me instructions on what to write, and my role as an analyst was so obscure that to this day, none of the senior people would be able to recognize me or know my name.”
Trump officials have not succeeded in their quest to use this fake scandal to distract from the president’s ongoing Epstein mess, but that’s not going to stop the administration from trying. But by putting such an emphasis on this, the Trump administration is ironically setting itself up for precisely the kind of intra-MAGA backlash that led to the ongoing Trump-Epstein debacle to begin with.
Nine senior Trump officials and others close to the president have vented to Rolling Stone in recent days that unless the administration actually goes the distance and prosecutes Trump’s top political enemies — including Obama, who consistently tops public opinion polls for most popular living president, or even politician, in the country — Team Trump is once again hyping up something it can’t or won’t deliver on for the MAGA base.
“It’s another ticking time bomb for himself,” a Trump adviser says. “We are promising them [the base] that these people committed the crime of the century, and that Dems are going down for this. What if we don’t … take them down? It’d be a broken promise.”
One Trump administration official adds that “people aren’t buying it.” The official notes they have received messages from high-profile Trump allies and MAGA-aligned influencers insisting that this “Obamagate” reboot will not get them to move on from Epstein. Some of these allies have already told this official different, eye-roll-style versions of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ regarding the Trump administration’s promise that they have conclusive proof of Obama and others’ criminal, indictable activities.
The ex-president, via a spokesperson, responded to Trump’s accusation of “treason” by calling it “ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
The second Trump administration has already taken concrete steps to criminally investigate and harass the president’s foes, often for doing things that clearly aren’t crimes or misconduct, but that annoyed Trump.
But several Trump advisers point out that one reason prosecuting Obama would be difficult is that the former president enjoys the same, Supreme Court-blessed presidential immunity protections that Trump appears eager to keep exploiting. But even if they don’t succeed in jailing Obama, that would leave several other former top government officials on the list for Trump, his intelligence appointees, and his Justice Department to target.
But that was the same theory headed into the second Trump administration, when the president and his lieutenants vowed to their most fervent supporters that the anti-Trump “Deep State” would unravel and that the Epstein “Files” would be unfurled for all to read.
Ever since Epstein’s death behind bars in 2019, both the Republican Party grassroots and its political and media elite have fostered right-wing conspiracy theories that the prolific abuser was murdered to cover-up the illicit activities or alleged sex crimes of Epstein’s social orbit of powerful and influential men, which once included Prince Andrew and former President Bill Clinton. To many of these conspiracists and believers, the long-concealed trove of federal investigative files on the late Epstein somehow hold the keys to exposing a Democratic, pedophile cabal running the anti-Trump “Deep State” — and that Trump is the man to finally topple them.
These theories proliferated among conservatives and MAGA diehards despite the fact that it is a matter of public record that Trump and Epstein were friends and party companions for years, and despite the fact that Trump was running the government when Epstein suddenly died.
Since the days of Trump’s first presidency, the mantra that Epstein didn’t kill himself became such a firmly held belief on the American right that Trump campaigned for reelection last year pledging to release the federal files on Epstein. Some of his highest-ranking appointees this term, like FBI leaders Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, helped push Epstein-related conspiracy theories when Trump was out of power.
Shortly after Trump was sworn back into office in January, his administration made a huge deal about how they were launching a new Epstein investigation and finally, finally, getting their base what they wanted and forcing the documents into the public domain. For months, federal law enforcement devoted substantial resources to reviewing the gigantic reservoir of documents. The administration kept teasing their supporters about coming revelations to the point that Attorney General Pam Bondi went on TV in February to tell the nation that the Epstein “client list” of elite co-conspirators and unpunished degenerates was “sitting on” her desk awaiting review.
Then this summer, it all came crashing down.
In early July, Trump’s Justice Department and FBI released a now-infamous memo declaring that Epstein, in fact, committed suicide and that the mythical “client list” that Bondi had referenced on Fox News did not exist. This triggered a fierce backlash from Trump-aligned influencers and activists who quickly alleged that Trump administration officials were now leading the Deep State’s Epstein cover-up. The severity of the fallout led to an intense spree of blame games and finger-pointing within the MAGA elite, exacerbated existing tensions within the top echelons of Trump’s government, including between Patel and Bondi, and nearly led to Bongino quitting in anger.
A number of elected Republicans on Capitol Hill have demanded answers. Democratic lawmakers and liberal groups, sensing an opportunity to sow chaos among the GOP ranks, have now made this a leading issue. This month, House Speaker and close Trump ally Mike Johnson chose to shut down Congress early, rather than have a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
As new leaks from his administration revealed that the attorney general indeed briefed Trump in May that his name is in the files, the president kept ordering his followers and the American people to move on. He trashed many of his supporters as “stupid” for not letting up on Epstein, and despite the Epstein files’ release being a longtime cause célèbre of the Trumpian right, the president started suggesting that President Obama and “Crooked Hillary” wrote the Epstein files in a way to make Trump look bad.
It didn’t work.
The issue is not going away, the administration continues to be consumed by it, and Trump’s poll numbers have gotten worse. A Washington Post poll released this week found that 61 percent of Americans “think the Epstein files contain embarrassing information about Trump.”
So now, the Trump administration’s primary effort — at which they’re throwing vast federal resources and manpower — to turn the page on the Epstein debacle is to collectively promote a far-right conspiracy theory about how a secret cabal of Trump-loathing “Deep State” subversives and liberal villains, at the direction of Obama, corruptly wrote some intel reports.
In doing so, the Trump administration is suggesting to its base that this mission will triumphantly — just you wait! — result in gratifying revelations, maximum criminal accountability, and the likely imprisonment of their sworn enemies.
The last time Team Trump did all that, they drove themselves straight into the ditch that they’re fumbling to pull themselves out of today.
