Is this the scandal that irreparably rocks President Trump’s political career? This question has been asked by the media thousands of times in the past decade. Given that President Trump is still in the White House, it is evident that the reasonable answer thus far has always been ‘no’.

This time, however, it feels different.

Mainly because the main source of the pressure is not the mainstream media, but rather an online grassroots effort. Some of the participants in that group effort are some of President Trump’s former avid supporters.

However, whether or not that is enough to severely damage the Trump legacy and significantly hurt Republicans in the 2028 presidential election is hard to gauge. As we laid out in an earlier opinion piece, approval rating polls, when they pertain to President Trump, are widely unreliable. Only one thing is certain: he has been consistently underpolled throughout his political career. In that context, his current approval rating in the RealClearPolitics aggregate, which stands at 46.2 per cent, is actually very encouraging for the GOP’s prospects.

It is even more so if we take into account that many of the same polls, even ones that are very unfavourable to President Trump on his approval, put the Democratic Party’s favourability even lower. For example, the most recent survey by Quinnipiac has measured President Trump’s approval at just 40 per cent. However, in the same poll, national approval of congressional Democrats was at just 19 (!) per cent…

This same concept can be projected to the Epstein issue as well. The idea that ‘you should be very upset with President Trump for not releasing the Epstein files, therefore you should vote Democrat’ just does not wash.

The Biden administration had four years to release those files, as that decision was at the discretion of Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In fact, multiple administrations could have gotten to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein's underage sex trafficking operation.

Epstein was first arrested for suspicion of procuring a minor for prostitution in 2005, and was indicted in 2006 in Florida state court and in federal court in 2007—under the Bush administration. However, he ended up getting away with a bafflingly light sentence. Epstein only got an 18-month prison sentence, and was granted ‘work release’ for six days a week after serving three and a half months.

Now, the Obama administration had eight years to investigate this obvious miscarriage of justice, but failed to do so. It was not until the first Trump administration, in 2019, that a criminal case against Epstein was reopened, and he was facing much harsher federal sex trafficking charges. In August 2019, his infamous death—either by suicide or murder—happened in a lonely jail cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, New York.

Thus, we have to acknowledge that, to put it bluntly, it was the first Trump administration that finally got the son of a bitch.

However, it is understandable that that detail gets lost given how strange President Trump and his administration have been in their public messaging about the thorny issue. Going from Attorney General Pam Bondi's 'The client list is on my desk' to the FBI's 'The client list does not exist' in just a few months should not bode well for any reasonable person.

You may have to make the MAGA base swallow the pill that Jeffrey Epstein's clients will never be revealed—after all, four different administrations from both parties have come to the conclusion that that is the best course of action—but this is not the way to do it. Here's another hard pill to swallow: as Epstein's former attorney Alan Dershowitz has explained, when the administration is talking about 'protecting the victims,' they may not just be referring to the underage and of-age women who were victims of sex trafficking by Epstein. They may also be including the powerful, wealthy people who were the victims of Epstein's alleged blackmail...

This is one hell of a sad, cruel, and messy situation. However, going back to the original question: will it be enough to permanently and significantly stain the Trump presidency?

According to Google Trends, interest in the Epstein case in the United States peaked on 18 July, and has been on a steady downward decline since. This can give the Trump administration the opportunity to seize back control of the narrative with some sensible updates and better communication. Sure, Epstein posts under President Trump's social media posts are still prevalent, but in the age of internet culture, that can become a 'stale meme' fairly soon. The recent incident when a reporter asked President Trump if the EU trade deal was a distraction from the Epstein case has also served to portray the ones who keep pushing for the files' release as unreasonable and malicious.

So, there are signs that suggest that President Trump can weather yet another storm, this time coming from a different direction—his own base.

However, even if he does manage to do that, questions about his connections to Epstein should still linger with a reasonable observer. We have to ask more.

Is Donald Trump on the Epstein List?

Here, we need to make one very important distinction. People tend to conflate two different things, leading to very dangerous confusion.

The Epstein files and the Epstein list are not the same thing. The Epstein files refer to all the information collected during the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein; while the Epstein list, also known as the client list, refers to the list of people to whom Epstein allegedly procured underage prostitutes.

It is likely that President Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files. He was a known associate of his until the mid-2000s. Epstein was asked about him during the deposition in his civil case, and in the court documents released by the Biden administration, Epstein is talking to one of his victims about visiting President Trump's now-defunct casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and mentions that he knows him personally.

However, that does not mean that President Trump is on the Epstein list. We would have to see a lot more evidence before we could reasonably conclude that the President of the United States has had sex with underage prostitutes. If there is any, his fierce opposition, the Democrats, have already had plenty of time to produce it—it is quite strange for them to suddenly expect that to come out under a Republican administration.

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