Donald Trump was a celebrity real estate developer when he posed at a party with the financier Jeffrey Epstein in 1997. Both men grinned at the camera as Trump’s hand rested lightly on Epstein’s shoulder.
Twenty-eight years later, Epstein is dead, and Trump is president of the United States. And their relationship — however deep or however fleeting — looms over the first serious rift within Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
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Some of Trump’s strongest supporters are enraged over an announcement by the Department of Justice that Epstein kept no list of powerful people with whom he was involved in sex trafficking and that his death was a suicide. Some MAGA figures are calling for Trump to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino has threatened to quit over Bondi’s decision not to release more files on the Epstein case.
Even as Trump implores his backers to move on from a conspiracy theory he previously endorsed, the outrage continues across social media and the world of conservative podcasts. Many are eager to see more files but somewhat afraid of what they might find.
At a conference for young conservatives, podcaster Brandon Tatum said Epstein was “involved in something nefarious that implicates a lot of people.”
“And my guess,” he added, “is that a whole lot of people may happen to be some of our allies and some people that we don’t want to have a bad relationship with.”
‘A weird situation’
Unbiased. Straight Facts.TM
Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019. The Department of Justice says the death was a suicide.
Conspiracy theories have surrounded all things Epstein since he was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
Among those who perpetuated claims that the government had hidden the truth about the case: Donald Trump.
In an interview with Fox News in June 2024, a host asked Trump whether he would “declassify” government files on Epstein’s death.
“Yeah, I would,” Trump said. “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”
“Certainly about the way he died,” Trump added. “It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc.”
Three months later, another interviewer asked Trump why the government had not released a list of people who visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.
“It’s very interesting, isn’t it,” Trump said. “It probably will be [made public], by the way, probably.”
“I’d have no problem with that,” he said.
After winning a second term in the White House, Trump appointed two prominent skeptics of the official Epstein narrative for top positions in his administration: Bondi to lead the Justice Department and Bongino as the No. 2 official at the FBI.
Bongino discussed the case on his podcast just two weeks before his appointment, suggesting that former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were somehow involved.
“It’s time to start overturning that rock and seeing what’s underneath,” Bongino said.
“The Jeffrey Epstein case, you do not know all the details of this thing, I promise,” he added. “There are a lot of really obviously powerful people.”
Bondi assembled a group of far-right influencers at the White House in February to share a binder of documents about the government’s Epstein investigation. Many of the documents were heavily redacted and contained little information that was not already public.
The same month, a Fox News interviewer asked Bondi if she planned to release “the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.”
“It’s sitting on my desk right now to review,” Bondi, appearing on air from the White House lawn, responded. “That’s been a directive by President Trump.”
On July 7, however, the Justice Department said the “client list” — the same document that Bondi said was on her desk almost five months earlier — didn’t exist.
A DOJ memo said it had no evidence to charge anyone else with crimes related to Epstein’s enterprise. It concluded that Epstein died by suicide. And it said no further documents would be released.
‘So, we’re stupid?’
The DOJ memo reportedly led to an angry confrontation at the White House involving Bondi, Bongino and his boss, FBI Director Kash Patel. According to multiple reports, Bongino considered resigning in anger after Bondi accused him of leaking a story that said the FBI wanted to release more documents about Epstein but had been overruled by the Justice Department.
Bongino’s status is so unclear that a CNN reporter said White House staff texted her Monday, July 14, to find out if he’s still on the job. Bongino himself has been silent on his social media accounts.
The anger quickly spread to Trump supporters outside his administration.
“So, we’re stupid?” comedian Andrew Schulz said on his podcast, “Flagrant.”
“It’s insulting our intelligence,” Schulz said. “Obviously, the intelligence community is trying to cover it up. Obviously, the Trump administration is trying to cover it up. Something changed, because they ran on this idea of exposing it all.”
To emphasize their disdain for being dismissed as conspiracy theorists, Schulz and his co-hosts recorded the podcast wearing tin-foil hats.
‘Tens of millions’ want more information
Trump’s efforts to tamp down discussion of the Epstein case have fallen short so far.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’?” he wrote on his Truth Social account. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!”
He urged his followers to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
Except, they do.
Michael Flynn, the retired Army general who was a national security adviser during Trump’s first term, wrote on X that “tens of millions” of the president’s supporters want to know more about the Epstein case.
“The EPSTEIN AFFAIR is an ugly stain on our society and those who abuse children, regardless of their status in life, must be held accountable,” Flynn wrote.
The president’s daughter-in-law, Fox News host Lara Trump, suggested he may be listening.
“I do think there needs to be more transparency on this,” she said on conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast. “I think that will happen. Look, I don’t know what truly exists there. But I know this is important to the president as well. He does want transparency on all these fronts, everything we’ve been talking about. Because it frustrated him as well.”
Democrats have also called for the release of more material about the Epstein case. But their requests underscore the tricky situation Trump finds himself in.
“He promised to release the Epstein files,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., told supporters at a campaign rally. “Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?”
