Furor over alleged Epstein files seems almost like fiction, but with real, immense consequences

Open this photo in gallery:

There’s a president who is a conspiracy theorist but who is resisting an examination of a conspiracy theory. There’s an effort to subpoena a figure in prison who was dedicated to protecting the oceans but was open to exploiting young women. There is a Speaker of the House of Representatives who sent lawmakers home so they couldn’t make any laws.

There is a man who heads a government he says can’t be trusted, but is asking his acolytes to trust him. There is a cache of documents the Justice Department said it had but now says it doesn’t. There is a MAGA effort to reveal information that their sometime allies in the Republican Party don’t want revealed.

This could only be Washington in the era of Donald Trump, where the truth is negotiable, contradictions are consistencies and government stonewalling is deplored until it is encouraged – and then deplored again.

There is everything out of the ordinary in this episode involving sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, so toxic a figure that even his (mysterious) prison death is a matter of conspiracy theories.

David Shribman: Trump risks losing his most loyal followers over Epstein conspiracy handling, health care cuts

This week, the President of the United States circulated a phony video depicting the arrest of his predecessor and then accused that predecessor of treason in the Oval Office; presidential diversionary tactics were so desperate that they included a dispute over Cleveland and Washington sports teams changing their names; and a furor involving purported documents produced by a man long dead took centre stage in the capital of the most powerful nation in history. At the very least, this week proves that while God may be dead (as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1882), and history may be over (as the scholar Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989), irony still lives in 2025.

All this may seem like the elements of an amusing sideshow in a B-list Washington drama, or a subplot in a dark political Netflix serial, or the raw materials of a historical novel some decades in the future. But there are immense contemporary consequences to this contretemps.

At stake are the loyalties of MAGA supporters whose adherence to Mr. Trump has been inviolable – perhaps until now.

At stake, too, is whether Mr. Trump’s vaunted immunity to political danger – tested by two impeachments, 91 felony indictments and the contempt of a political establishment he says has ruled, and ruined, the country for decades – is in jeopardy.

At stake, also, is whether the reign of the disrupter-in-chief has been disrupted.

And at stake is whether a president who wants deep change can change the political discussion.

This is a particularly dangerous moment for Mr. Trump, though he has approached and conquered danger before, always emerging stronger.

But the President knows, or surely suspects, that it is the small things that have the power to trip up the big figures, the way the 1960s affair John Profumo conducted with Christine Keeler helped upend the Conservative government of British prime minister Harold Macmillan, or how tax-evasion charges brought down the Prohibition-era Chicago mobster Al Capone.

In Mr. Trump’s world, a mere affair or ties to a sexual predator (who in this case trafficked in underage women) might decades ago have seemed a trifling thing. No longer. And though the wheels of justice may seem to move slowly, events in this matter are moving, as William Butler Yeats would have put it, like “galloping horses.”

As if on cue, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday: “We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!”

On Tuesday alone, two federal judges said they would make expeditious efforts to unseal grand-jury transcripts of the prosecutions of Mr. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted and imprisoned for child sex trafficking. The Justice Department sought to interview Ms. Maxwell, and the GOP-controlled House oversight committee moved to subpoena her.

“Since Ms. Maxwell is in federal prison, the committee will work with the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons to identify a date when the committee can depose her,” the committee said in a statement.

Opinion: Keep it up, nasty Canadians

Left unexplored, at least for now, is whether, in the hope for a Trump pardon, Ms. Maxwell might trim her deposition to favour the President’s interests, which could include details of his links with Mr. Epstein. A former Epstein employee and onetime Trump partner Elon Musk have both made dark, but unsubstantiated, suggestions about ties between the financier and Mr. Trump.

Also on Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson sent House members on their summer vacation so they would not have to vote on amendments Democrats were offering on the Epstein matter.

Mr. Johnson’s worry: In a remarkable reversal of expectations, the Democrats would embrace the desire of MAGA members to release the documents in defiance of Republicans’ hopes to stall or prevent their release.

This illuminates the difference between the MAGA demands and the Republicans’ hopes – the first time there has been such a fission, and one that endangers the remarkable confluence of interest between the President and the unlikely coalition he has sculpted.

Accounts of the death of this alliance, as Mark Twain said of rumours involving him, have until now been greatly exaggerated. They may be exaggerated in this matter. But while Mr. Epstein has been dead for almost six years – Mr. Trump expressed impatience with the whole episode, calling it “boring” – the controversies surrounding him are still alive.