A bill in Congress demanding the release of the Epstein files now has the official, albeit reluctant, endorsement of the president himself. And so the question naturally arises: If Donald Trump supports the bill calling on the president (i.e., him) to release the files, why not simply … release them?
Trump reportedly hasn’t given his advisers or allies a rationale for why he won’t do so, leaving them to invent reasons of their own. The answer they’ve come up with is that Trump is innocent and is acting guilty for no reason whatsoever. “He looks like he has something to hide even if he doesn’t,” asserts the Wall Street Journal editorial page. “This is a self-inflicted wound,” complains Megyn Kelly.
But why has Trump chosen to inflict this wound upon himself? A Trump ally suggests to Politico that the president, like many young children, is expressing what some might call oppositional defiant disorder: “POTUS doesn’t like to be told what to do or give Dems a win, so he’s been fighting it.” This theory might make more sense if releasing the Epstein files hadn’t been Trump’s own idea before he abruptly reversed course earlier this year.
Trump’s own responses to this very question are even less reassuring.
Asked on Air Force One last Friday why he won’t just release the files, Trump snapped at a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy.” As a longtime married man, I have seen enough rom-coms to recognize the trope where Mr. Wrong, after having maintained a thin veneer of suitability for 90 percent of the movie while misbehaving just enough to make the audience root against him, suddenly rips off the mask and delivers a crass or entitled speech that makes the heroine snap out of her infatuation. A set piece in which the bad guy, under suspicion of misogynistic conduct and consorting with a trafficker of teenage girls, launches a sexist attack on an inquisitive female journalist would be too ham-handed even for the writers at the Hallmark Channel.
Trump apparently concluded that this scenery-chewing performance was too subtle and conciliatory. So when an ABC reporter asked the same question at the White House yesterday, he promptly assailed the reporter’s “attitude,” called the question “insubordinate and just a terrible question,” accused the journalist of being “a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” threatened to take away ABC’s broadcast license, and again did not answer the question.
Trump’s bellicose replies are so substantively vacant that it is difficult to discern the administration’s actual position. Having helped whip up paranoia that the “deep state” was burying the Jeffrey Epstein case to protect the elite, Trump pledged to release these files as president. But Trump seems to have forgotten these promises, and the Justice Department and the FBI announced over the summer that, after an “exhaustive review” of these files, “we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Perhaps the DOJ didn’t share its findings with Trump, given that he wrote on Truth Social last week, “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”
So maybe there is evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties? Apparently so, because Bondi immediately accepted the assignment, explaining this morning that new information had driven her decision, which only coincidentally came after Trump ordered her to look into various political enemies.
In place of any explanation as to why Trump is withholding the files, his staff has taken to threatening retribution. “The Democrats are going to come to regret this,” a White House official told Politico. “Let’s start with Stacey Plaskett. You think we’re not going to make a scene of this?”
Plaskett is a nonvoting Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands who exchanged texts with Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing. If the revenge campaign is going to start with her, one wonders where it will end: A state legislative aide? An assistant sewage commissioner in Omaha?
I suspect that the threat of making Plaskett’s career collateral damage will not deter Democrats from continuing to demand the release of the files.
Trump is now left simultaneously insisting that Epstein is too tedious to merit discussion—“pretty boring stuff”—and is also the nuclear bomb that will destroy the entire Democratic Party, or at least an obscure elected official or two. In this way, the Epstein investigation exists in a state of uncertainty, both alive and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat—trapped in a box that, like the ones holding the Epstein files, cannot be opened.
