It’s Not Business, It’s Personal

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This is why nearly every cultural skirmish eventually leads to prominent liberals wringing their hands about “distractions.” They’re so prone to it that from time to time they’ll do it reflexively, even when they’re on the right side of public opinion in a cultural dispute. Ask California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dismissed anxiety about Kilmar Abrego Garcia being sent to El Salvador without due process in April as a “distraction” from the supposedly more urgent business of rallying against Trump’s tariffs.

Somewhere in the left-wing imagination lies an unshakeable belief that every right-wing political preoccupation is a ploy designed to lure Democrats into throwing themselves “off-message” by engaging with it. That belief will surely reveal itself again as the saga of the Jeffrey Epstein files plays out.

In fact, it already has. “I think the Democrats have just this wonderful opportunity … this Big, Beautiful Bill, people detest this. And the more that they find out about it, the more they detest it,” James Carville told CNN on Tuesday. “The Epstein thing is a distraction.”

Is that right? Does it follow that Democrats should drop the Epstein “distraction”?

Or, with 16 months to go before the midterms, is there perhaps a bit of room amid the broadsides at the One Big Beautiful Bill for caring about whether the president was an accomplice to the most notorious child molester in American history—and is now trying to cover it up?

We can (and will, as usual) overthink the strategic pros and cons of Democrats going hard at Republicans over Epstein in what follows, but ultimately it isn’t a matter of strategy. It’s a matter of revenge.

It’s not business. It’s personal.

Political poison.

I can think of two vaguely decent arguments for Democrats to lay off the Epstein matter and let Republicans fight it out among themselves. One is that they’re unlikely to benefit much from it. 

They will, and should, follow Carville’s advice next fall by running on the policy disasters lurking in the tax-and-spend bill that Republicans just passed. That legislation is political poison; it would be malpractice not to make the GOP swallow it. Unless the Justice Department’s Epstein files really do incriminate Trump—and they probably don’t, as that presumably would have leaked at some point—then this controversy will fade soon enough. There’s no sense in Democrats investing much time in it.

The problem with that argument is that the Epstein matter is also politically poisonous for Republicans.

“Internal Democratic polling … found that 70 percent of voters said law enforcement is withholding information about powerful people connected to Epstein, including 61 percent of Trump voters,” Politico reported on Wednesday. If you doubt those numbers because internal polls tend to be self-serving, try this: A new CNN survey discovered just 3 percent of Americans and 4 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the amount of information that the federal government has released about the Epstein case.

A third poll, from YouGov, asked respondents whether the feds should publish the documents they have on the late pervert-financier. Seventy-nine percent said yes. When asked if they believe the government is covering up the evidence it has on him, 67 percent agreed. Among Republicans, 50 percent said so versus just 15 percent who doubted it.

One more. A survey from the left-wing outfit Data for Progress quizzed Republican voters specifically on whether they approve or disapprove of how Trump’s administration has handled the question of releasing the files. Those who have heard “a lot” about the controversy split 40-55, a rare case of the president being deeply underwater with highly engaged populists.

No one thinks that the Epstein snafu will turn Joe Rogan and his neo-right listeners back into Bernie bros. (I don’t, anyway.) But could it convince some of them to boycott the midterms if it becomes one part of a broader case that Republicans have failed recent MAGA converts? Sure.

Listen to the man himself. The right is suffering a crisis of trust and the left can benefit from that at the polls, if only marginally then perhaps still decisively. You can rarely go wrong in politics by siding with the majority on a hot-button issue, especially when that majority is pushing 80 percent.

Tribal polarization.

The other argument for Democrats to lay off of Epstein is the one I made at the end of Monday’s newsletter. Trump’s best bet to escape this clusterfark with his coalition intact is for liberals to push their way to the front of the populist parade that’s demanding answers from the DOJ and turn it into another tribally polarized issue along the usual left-right lines.

The more the president’s enemies take political ownership of the effort to release the files, the less the grassroots right will want to join it.

Trump knows it too, which is why he’s begun alleging that the Epstein files were written by Barack Obama, James Comey, and other central-casting Democratic villains. Logically, that’s idiotic: His fans want to hear that Obama and Comey are in the files, not that they’re behind them. But he knows from long experience that the surest way to get his troops to fall in line behind him is to start muttering about left-wing plots. It’s a Pavlovian response.

This morning he even used the magic word, sending up the MAGA bat signal by dubbing the current controversy the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” When Trump is in a political jam and starts muttering about “hoaxes,” that’s your cue as a populist to treat the controversy as a pure us-and-them loyalty test.

So there’s something to be said for Democrats lying low and depriving him of the foil he’s counting on to help him wriggle out of this. Let Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, and a constellation of other trusted right-wing influencers take the lead in rallying MAGA. Liberals should remember the old saying: When your enemy is making a mistake, get out of his way.

If instead they push Bondi and the DOJ to release the files, Democrats will be taking a double risk—first that their interest will alienate Republicans, and second that the files will be released and confirm that Trump isn’t suspected of child abuse (or, perhaps, that some in their own ranks are). Better to back off, let the president and his attorney general continue to suppress the documents, and let the right stew in its own paranoia about why its leader seems so keen to run interference for a coven of Satanic pedophiles.

That argument doesn’t work either, though, for the simple reason that Trump really might make this go away if his opponents don’t press him on it.

The word has apparently come down from the Mar-a-Lago politburo to influential commissars that it’s time to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Some have obeyed, including Republican state media: Fox News reportedly mentioned Epstein just eight times during its live coverage on Monday, compared to 158 mentions of Joe Biden. The House GOP has already defeated two attempts this week to force a floor vote on releasing the DOJ’s Epstein files, meanwhile, and will likely soon defeat another. 

Don’t underestimate the MAGA establishment’s ability to organize a conspiracy of silence on the right about uncomfortable subjects. They’ve done it many times with other Trump scandals. Granted, the Epstein matter is different insofar as populists continue to believe (for now) that the truth about it will reflect badly on Democrats, not on Trump, but that might not matter. The purpose of modern right-wing media is to promote information that’s useful, not information that’s true, and Trump has decreed—for whatever reason—that further information on Epstein isn’t useful.

So getting out of the way isn’t an option for liberals. If they want to avert a top-down Republican blackout on the Epstein files, they’ll need to keep talking about them.

Meltdown.

They have a sound strategic reason to do so, too. Simply put, the president and his team have handled the Epstein uproar abysmally, and keeping the pressure on is apt to lead them into further destructive mistakes.

Bondi had distinguished herself as the most incompetent player in the process until Tuesday evening, when Trump’s anger that his fans won’t let this drop boiled over. “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” he told reporters. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid but it’s boring. … I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going.”

“Pretty bad people” in this case would seem to include nearly the entirety of MAGA.

I’m not kidding. On Wednesday morning the president went as far as to disown his own fans if they persist in caring about Epstein:

[Democrats’] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bulls–t,” 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. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

It’s very funny that the ultimate culture warrior, a diehard conspiracy theorist, is now mad at his voters for caring more about culture-war conspiracies than about policy wins. But I digress.

We’re only 10 days into this crisis and, as the passage above makes clear, already Trump has had a mental break over it severe enough to cause him to excommunicate his own cult. Even the most zombified kooks in his coalition are pleading with him to take justice for the Great Child-Molestation Cabal more seriously. To make matters worse, suspicious new revelations about the DOJ and Epstein keep trickling out.

If you’re a Democrat watching the right melt down, you don’t need an elaborate strategic argument to figure out your next step. You turn up the heat and hope for the best. Who knows? With any luck, the schismatic fundamentalist offshoot of MAGA that I predicted last week might arrive sooner than expected.

But as I said at the start of this piece, the left’s interest in the Epstein chaos isn’t ultimately about strategy, it’s about revenge. Retribution, one might call it.

Retribution.

For 10 years Democrats have been whipping boys for the most successful demagogue in American history. More than 10, actually, as it was Trump who took the right’s paranoia about Barack Obama’s birth certificate mainstream in 2011. Democrats nearly had the presidency stolen from them in 2020 when Trump hatched an inane conspiracy theory about election-rigging. Many of his fans treat it as received wisdom that elite liberals are, to a man, complicit in a global ring of degenerate pedophiles.

Seeing Trump now hoisted with his own petard in the Epstein matter is just deserts, an immensely gratifying bit of political karma for Trump enemies of all stripes. At last the leopards are nibbling at his own face. After all the demagoguery they’ve endured, who would begrudge Democrats wanting to add a little ketchup?

It’s not business this time, it’s personal. And seeing their leaders get personal may be important to rank-and-file liberals.

“Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty—and not be afraid to get hurt,” Axios reported last week. “Get hurt” wasn’t metaphorical. One House Democrat told the outlet that some grassroots leftists believe their representatives need to be “willing to get shot” when visiting ICE facilities or federal agencies. Another Democrat claimed his constituents believe “civility isn’t working” and that the time has come to prepare for “violence … to fight to protect our democracy.”

Reading that reminded me of the backlash that Chuck Schumer faced in March when he declined to support a federal shutdown. Strategically, it was the right move. Had Democrats shut things down, they would have validated the traditional Tea Party tactic of holding the government hostage while almost certainly failing to receive meaningful concessions from Trump.

But politics isn’t always about strategy, as Schumer-bashing liberals demonstrated in the aftermath. Sometimes it’s about gratifying the partisan id.

It’s always about gratifying the id, Trump might reply—and while that seems like an overstatement, his record in national elections suggests it isn’t much of one. I can imagine the jealous exasperation Democrats must feel at seeing the weenies in their own leadership forever fretting about “distractions” and “messaging” while the guy on the other side bulldozes his way to two presidential victories and one near-miss.

Flogging paranoia about an Epstein cover-up is Democrats’ chance to hop into the bulldozer and give Trump a taste of his own demagogic medicine. For once, his own party will get to see how it feels to have its leadership loosely smeared as suspects in a ruthless child-abuse conspiracy. That might not deliver (many) votes to liberals on Election Day 2026, but it will help appease a base that’s frantic to go on offense and wound the right.

You can call that “strategy” if you like, I suppose, although I’d say that strategy is often a matter of doing what you wish to do and then backfilling logical reasons to justify it. Either way, for Democrats, sowing mischief among Republicans over Epstein is a no-brainer.