Donald Trump is rolling out a dramatic new strategy to undermine concerns that his administration is hiding information related to Jeffrey Epstein. The President, having weathered a week of criticism after the Justice Department effectively closed the case, is now referring to it as a “hoax”. He argued: “These files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by Biden.”

This is a clever strategy though it’s still likely to fail. Trump is invoking the very real malfeasance of his political enemies in the intelligence community to persuade his supporters those enemies once again abused their powers to frame him. This has the added effect of allowing Trump to lump his GOP critics in with those who bought into the Russia-collusion narrative during his first term and ended up looking like gullible skeptics who were part of the swamp.

On Trump’s Truth Social post today, the President suggested as much, claiming: “My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years…Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work.”

Those unhappy with the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case include the most loyal pundits in the MAGA base, from Benny Johnson to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to Tucker Carlson. These are not people who can be conned into taking Democratic Party talking points against Trump.

They supported him for the same reason many normal Americans supported him: Trump promised to be an outsider who’d take on the insiders. Since 2019, the Epstein scandal has lived in the American imagination as perhaps the single most high-profile example of elites abusing their power to break the law in heinous ways with zero accountability. It would be hard to find a case that more perfectly symbolizes the system Trump pledged to fix, which is why the case became a priority for the MAGA movement.

Of course, to the Left, this has always appeared naive. Trump was friendly with Epstein after all, so why could he be expected to deliver true transparency? Again, though, this is core to Trump’s appeal. He was also friendly with the Clintons, who even attended his wedding with Melania, and that made him a more intense and effective critic of the family in 2016.

But it would have been one thing for Trump 2.0 to delay or provide only limited disclosure in the Epstein case. It’s quite another for Trump to now claim the whole scandal is a Democratic Party hoax, which makes little sense given that high-level officials in his own administration — from the attorney general to the FBI director to the vice president — fanned the flames of the case for years.

Epstein was described by ABC News in 2019 as a “prolific donor to various Democratic campaigns and party committees over the past couple decades.” This strategy may be Trump’s best shot at stigmatizing his critics and righting the ship, but it is also one hell of a stretch. Given that many influential podcasters now have years of recorded posts and videos arguing the government is keeping information on Epstein secret, it seems strange that Trump is now asking them to take a massive blow by suggesting their years of coverage and concern amounts to a hoax.

In 2022, Axios reported that Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan “Afghanistan withdrawal began [his] political slide.” By the time Biden left office, it was clear that moment marked the turning point in his presidency. It wasn’t anyone’s top priority at the polls in 2024, but Biden’s pledge to restore “decency” to Washington made for a poor juxtaposition with the unforced errors and tragedy leading to Kabul’s fall. His credibility as a restorer of moral standards never recovered.

Virtually nobody’s top electoral priority is an Epstein document dump, but the case is so high-profile and so horrific that Trump’s reaction to good-faith campaigns for disclosure stands to damage his credibility as a true outsider like nothing else has in the last decade. At some point, it won’t be the top story of the day anymore, but that doesn’t mean it won’t also still weigh on people’s minds. Without significant disclosures, Trump may never shake the lasting effect.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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