Wired reports:

Privately, some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies have come to a sobering conclusion. There’s simply nothing that can be done, they’ve come to believe, to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

People aren’t jumping off the Trump train yet—at least not in significant numbers, though polling shows at least 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Epstein case in recent weeks—but the damage has been done with supporters.

“Honestly, like, fuck Trump,” a Trumpworld source who works in conservative media tells me. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s obviously something nefarious that went on.” (The White House did not return a request for comment; Trump in recent months has repeatedly called the Epstein case a hoax.)

The Epstein story has been a viral content machine on the right for years, and it has too much momentum behind it to simply be shut down and stopped in its tracks. The problem runs deeper than Trump’s name reportedly appearing in the so-called files that his campaign and new administration repeatedly promised to release and then didn’t. It even runs deeper than the fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed a relationship for years, the full dimensions of which remain unknown and about which the president has not been especially forthcoming. (Epstein was asked whether he’d “socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18” when being deposed in March 2010; he declined to answer, citing his Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. For years, the president has claimed he fell out with Epstein around 2004. Recently, though, he implied the falling out had happened earlier, a date which has been alleged in court records to have occurred in 2000. This uncertainty complicates things, especially since some of the most infamous links between the two are subsequent to that date. It was in a 2002 New York magazine article, for example, that Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” and said he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)

The Trump-Epstein saga is in many ways best understood as a cautionary tale in setting expectations too high. Trump put himself in an untenable position once he got back in office when he campaigned on using the powers of the federal government to declassify the Epstein files. The anti-establishment sentiment and deep distrust in institutions that resonated so deeply with his voters are now working against him, day after day—and there’s no easy fix. [Continue reading…]