Why Trump Can’t Make MAGA Diehards Forget About Epstein
November 12 was a very busy day in the White House as Donald Trump’s congressional allies worked overtime to end the longest government shutdown in history. But it does not appear the president was spending any time burning up the phone lines to Congress to ensure the reopening of the government. Instead, he was worried about something unrelated: trying to talk House Republicans into removing their signatures from a discharge petition forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a mostly Democratic-backed bill to make the Justice Department disgorge all its material on the late sex predator and his associations.
Trump spoke with one signatory, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who also met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel on the subject in the White House. She did not change her mind. Trump also tried to reach another, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who sent the president a message explaining why she, too, would turn down his blandishments, as the New York Times reported: “Ms. Mace, who is running for governor, wrote Mr. Trump a long explanation of her own history of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change positions, according to a person familiar with her actions.”
And so from the White House’s point of view, the worst-case scenario happened despite Trump’s personal lobbying. When recently elected Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in after a long and very suspicious delay, she quickly became the 218th signature on the discharge petition, and House Speaker Mike Johnson duly announced the chamber would vote on the Epstein Files bill next week.
This is really odd for multiple reasons.
First of all, one of the most important political stories of 2025 has been the abject subservience of congressional Republicans to Donald Trump. They’ve rubber-stamped nearly all of his appointees, even some they probably privately considered unqualified; devoted much of the year to developing and enacting a budget reconciliation bill that they officially labeled the “One Big Beautiful Act” to reflect Trump’s distinctive branding; stood by quietly as he and his underlings (at first DOGE honcho Elon Musk and then OMB director Russ Vought) obliterated congressional prerogatives in naked executive-branch power grabs; and regularly sang hymns of praise to the all-powerful leader. But the Epstein-files issue appears to be different. Politico reports that House Republicans expect “mass defections” on the bill forcing disclosure now that a vote cannot be avoided. That’s amazing in view of Trump’s oft-repeated claim that any Republicans interested in the Epstein-files “hoax” are “stupid.”
Second of all, Boebert and Mace are Trump loyalists of the highest order. Boebert always has been a MAGA stalwart. And after some earlier rifts with Trump, Mace has become a huge cheerleader for him, backing him over Nikki Haley in 2024 and receiving his endorsement for her own tough primary contest last year. Mace desperately needs and wants his endorsement in a multicandidate gubernatorial primary next year. That she spurned his request to back off the Epstein Files discharge petition speaks volumes about how important it is to her to maintain solidarity with Epstein’s victims right now. That seems to be the primary motive for Boebert as well, as the Times noted a couple of months ago:
Ms. Boebert, who grew up moving around the country and living with different men her mother was dating, has been less vocal [than Mace] about her own experiences. But she has also alluded to abuse and trauma. In her memoir, Ms. Boebert wrote that one of the men she lived with for a time in Colorado when she was young was verbally and physically abusive to her mother.
During her divorce last year, Ms. Boebert was also granted a temporary restraining order against her ex-husband, Jayson Boebert, after she said he was threatening to harm her and enter the family’s home without permission.
Third of all, it’s important to remember that Epstein in particular, and the idea of a cabal of elite sex traffickers in general, are highly resonant topics for elements of the MAGA base. Boebert and a third Republican signatory of the Epstein-files discharge petition, Marjorie Taylor Greene, first came to Congress closely identified with the supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which Epstein and his global-elite friends are key figures. Indeed, as my colleague Charlotte Klein observed this summer, discussion of the Epstein files has for years served as a routine conservative dog whistle to QAnon folk:
All of this gives more mainstream right-wing figures an opportunity to take advantage of some of that QAnon energy: They can use Epstein’s story as a way to nod to the QAnon theories of widespread Democratic child-sex trafficking and to bolster their own audiences,” said Matthew Gertz of Media Matters. “You can run segments on it on Fox News in a way that you just can’t about QAnon, and so that makes it a much broader right-wing story.”
Trump himself has often fed this particular beast, as Karen Tumulty reminds us in arguing that this is a “wedge issue” dividing the president from his otherwise adoring followers:
Trump was stoking conspiracy theories about Epstein at least as far back as the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. Asked for his opinion of Bill Clinton, Trump replied, “Nice guy.” Then he added: “Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island. With Jeffrey Epstein.”
Trump’s whole political enterprise has heavily depended on a strategy of maximum polarization along with mobilization of an intensely loyal base. So this is a problem for him that he cannot wave or wish away.