If President Donald Trump has nothing to hide vis-à-vis Jeffrey Epstein, he sure has a weird way of showing it.
Trump hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with the convicted sex offender, but he’s doing a great job of looking suspicious.
And that could be a political problem in and of itself – regardless of whatever ultimately comes from the Epstein files.
A batch of newly released Epstein emails on Wednesday added details about Trump’s past relationship with Epstein but no smoking guns. (The White House said the emails “prove absolutely nothing.”)
In one of those emails from 2011, Epstein expressed surprise to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump’s name hadn’t surfaced amid accusations involving Epstein. Epstein added that Trump had at one point spent hours with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre at Epstein’s house.
And in 2019, Epstein appeared to signal Trump was quite aware of Maxwell recruiting girls from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the early 2000s, saying “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
While some have claimed these emails show Trump had knowledge of or even involvement in Epstein’s crimes, it’s not nearly so evident. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, has acknowledged meeting Trump and never accused him of wrongdoing. And Trump has acknowledged being aware of Maxwell recruiting employees including Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago. (The big question there is whether Trump had any inkling about what Maxwell was recruiting a minor female like Giuffre for.)
But also notable on Wednesday was Trump’s reaction.
As all this was going down, he and his White House seemed preoccupied with what appeared to an 11th-hour campaign to thwart a House discharge petition that would force a vote on releasing the full Epstein files.
With the petition due to get a decisive 218th signature when a new Democratic member of Congress was sworn in later that day, the White House held a meeting in the Situation Room with a key GOP lawmaker who’d signed on, while another said she was playing phone tag with the president. Both GOP congresswomen later told CNN Trump hadn’t personally lobbied them to remove their names. But the president also publicly pressured Republicans who sided with Democrats on forcing Epstein disclosures.
It was a weird move, to be sure. No Republicans removed their names from the petition, and Speaker Mike Johnson quickly said he would schedule a vote for next week on compelling the Justice Department to release the full files.
Even if the measure passes in the House, that’s not the end of the story. The GOP-led Senate would still have to take it up, and Trump would still have to sign it. So it’s not like this will cause the imminent release of the documents.
But Trump’s resistance to something his base has long clamored for – and the optics of the Situation Room meeting in particular – would only seem to deepen the huge suspicions that a large number of Americans already harbor about the government covering up Epstein-related matters.
And that gets at the big point here – and the political danger for Trump.
This is merely the latest baffling episode in the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Among the others:
- The administration’s suspiciously timed, sudden reversal on releasing the files.
- Trump’s belated disclosure of his knowledge of Maxwell’s Mar-a-Lago recruitment.
- Trump’s weird denial of authoring a lewd letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday album.
- His other false claims about Epstein-related matters.
- The administration’s dubious decision to grant an interview with Maxwell, which seemed geared more toward helping Trump than anything else. (Sure enough, the newly released emails undercut Maxwell’s claims about Trump in that interview.)
- The transfer of Maxwell to a minimum-security prison camp that she didn’t appear eligible for without a waiver. The administration still hasn’t explained how this happened, months later. And CNN’s MJ Lee reported Thursday that Maxwell is getting special treatment there.
Even if Trump doesn’t have anything to hide, the danger here is in making it look a whole lot like he does.
That’s because people are primed to believe there’s a real conspiracy beneath the surface, and Trump’s actions risk making him own it.
The polling tells the tale.
This is perhaps Trump’s worst issue, by the margin who disapprove. Americans generally disapprove of his and the administration’s handling of the Epstein matter by around a 3-to-1 margin in most polls. The most recent poll, a Reuters-Ipsos survey from last month, showed Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of it 57%-19%. Independents disapproved 59%-10%.
And like virtually every other survey on the topic, not even a majority of Republicans said they approved: 44%.
Americans are also quite unhappy with the administration’s transparency and disclosure.
An August Pew Research Center survey showed 63% of Americans and even 38% of Republican-leaning Americans had little or no trust in what the Trump administration was saying about the matter.
Similarly, an August Quinnipiac University poll showed voters said 73%-16% that the Justice Department wasn’t being transparent about its investigation.
All of that said, this is clearly not a top-tier issue for most Americans. Relatively few have seemed to be paying close attention. Only about one-quarter were following it “extremely” or “very” closely in the Pew survey.
But crucially, it’s also something Americans are liable to believe the worst about.
To wit:
- 69% of Americans said the government is probably hiding information about Epstein’s clients, according to a July Reuters-Ipsos poll.
- 92% think the files probably include damaging information about wealthy or powerful people, per a July CBS News-YouGov poll.
- 69% doubt the Trump administration’s claim that there is no Epstein “client list,” according to a Yahoo News-YouGov poll the same month.
That same poll showed even 33% of Republicans said Trump hadn’t gone far enough to get to the bottom of Epstein matters.
And perhaps most strikingly, only 26% of Americans and just 55% of Republicans were willing to rule out that Trump had engaged in crime with Epstein. (Trump hasn’t been charged with any crimes related to Epstein.)
That’s a lot of Americans who are inclined to believe the worst here – or are at least willing to entertain it. People also seem to have very little confidence and trust in what the administration is doing or saying about all of this.
And Trump’s conduct just keeps giving them reason to be suspicious.