The Epstein controversy threatens to distract from Trump’s wins : NPR

President Trump and the Justice Department’s handling of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case is threatening to distract the public from his string of wins and take over his agenda, according to a Republican strategist Alex Conant.

“This is not what they want to be talking about,” said Conant, a partner at Firehouse Strategies and Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump hinted during the 2024 presidential campaign that the Epstein files — which were thought to include a “client list” used by the convicted sex offender to allegedly blackmail powerful people — would be released.

But this week, the president urged his supporters to move on from discussing the case after the Justice Department announced it found no evidence during its review of the case that such a list existed and that no more files about the case would be made public.

“You see their frustration starting to bubble over and the president’s tone and his lengthy tweets earlier this week where he was attacking his own supporters for fixating on this,” Conant said in an interview with Morning Edition.

Epstein died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His death has fueled conspiracy theories even though Trump administration officials have confirmed his death was suicide.

Trump is now focused on convincing the MAGA base to move on at a time when he would rather be selling his wins, like the passage of his signature tax and spending bill, avoiding a wider conflict between Israel and Iran and Thursday’s Senate vote to claw back billions of dollars from public media and foreign aid.

Trump has gone as far as calling the Epstein situation a “hoax” and chastised supporters who have “bought into this bull****” in a recent Truth Social post.

“His supporters are fixated on this decade-old scandal that he can’t ever make them happy on and it’s deeply frustrating to him,” Conant said.

Speaking to NPR’s Michel Martin, Conant discussed why this moment is proving so difficult for the president and how he might maneuver it.

This interview is edited for length and clarity. 

Michel Martin: So this whole thing about slamming his supporters, calling them stupid, saying they’re doing the Democrats dirty work for them. In one of those social media posts, he said he didn’t want their support anymore. It’s unusual to be slamming your supporters like this, but is this useful in any way in tamping this down?

Alex Conant: It’s very unusual for Trump. One of the things that has really marked his political career is that he never allows any daylight between himself and his base. You think back to the first term, where he took so much heat over immigration enforcement at the border vis-à-vis families [separation] and then so much heat during the pandemic with masks and the way he treated Anthony Fauci — and he always ends up siding with his base. I can’t think of another time where he’s attacked his own base like this for disagreeing with him on something. And I think it’s just evidence that he is just so frustrated that they want to talk about something that’s not helpful politically. And he wants to talk about things that do help him politically with independents, with moderates heading into the midterms next year.

Martin: There are some people who are going to be listening to this and be saying, “what is this about even really?” Why do you think this issue resonates so much with Trump’s base?

Conant: I think there’s a lot of political opponents of his base that have been kind of wrapped up in the Epstein scandals over the years, just through their social connections or business connections with him. Obviously, the way that Epstein died was very suspicious in the minds of the base. And there’s become all this media built up around it. Books have been written, podcasts, TV shows about it, and people have just gotten really wrapped up in the scandal thinking that there’s a lot more to it.

Martin: Excuse me, but aren’t people in his own administration wrapped up in it? I mean, people in the sense of being part of making this a thing like his FBI director, Kash Patel, his deputy FBI director Dan Bongino.

Conant: Absolutely. Now to be clear, they peddled a lot of conspiracies, this being one of them, but then they get put in charge of the FBI. And I think that the other issue here is that there’s just a real mismanagement of expectations with his base vis-à-vis what the administration is actually able to deliver, in part because he put in the FBI director and the deputy FBI director, in part because they promised to get to the bottom of the Epstein issues.

Martin: Elon Musk has been posting about this a lot this week. Obviously, I think most people know they had a falling out, but at one point [Musk] said if this is all a hoax, why Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate, is in prison for sex trafficking? Is Musk a part of this or is he kind of an ancillary character because it already was a big thing?

Conant: I think he and lots of other people are piling on at this point. Anyone who has an ax to grind with the president views this as a scab that they can pick at because they know that Trump doesn’t have good answers at this point because in his mind, in the Justice Department’s mind, they have released everything on this that they are legally allowed to release and their hands are really tied moving forward. And yet it’s not enough for people like Musk and his opponents.

Martin: So before we let you go, does this have legs?

Conant: Well, we’ll see. I mean, nobody changes the topic better than Donald Trump. And he has a lot to talk about these days. That said, his base is not going to ever be satisfied on this unless they’re able to somehow provide more information.

Martin: Why not? Why can’t they be satisfied?

Conant: People who are so invested in an idea, in a conspiracy — you can’t convince them that they’re wrong without evidence. And the administration is having trouble providing evidence that they’re wrong.

This digital story was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi. The radio version was produced by Arezou Rezvani, Kaity Kline and Nia Dumas.