Vice President JD Vance weighed in on the ongoing drama over the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files — and it could reveal a brewing power struggle over the future of MAGA, wrote Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift for The Bulwark.
The saga has become an ongoing headache for the Trump administration, as his own base — which peddled conspiracy theories about Epstein's death and his supposed "client list" of wealthy co-conspirators for years — has become frustrated that the administration can't deliver on what it promised.
"Vance chose to interrupt his vacation yesterday for an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business channel," they wrote Monday. "Bartiromo predictably asked Vance about Epstein. Vance chose not simply to deflect and say blandly that the administration was handling the situation responsibly. Nor did he choose to defend Donald Trump and assert confidently that Trump had done nothing wrong."
Rather, they wrote, Vance said “President Trump has demanded full transparency” — even though little if any information has actually been released so far — before claiming there could be a number of Democrats in the files too, potentially generating still further interest from the base, and saying, “a lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers.”
"Perhaps Vance was simply being clumsy," they wrote. "But if one had a suspicious mind, one might think Vance knows what he’s doing. Perhaps he doesn’t mind seeing Trump embroiled in the Epstein scandal. Vance presumably had no connection to Epstein, so he’s at no risk if the files are released. And to the degree Trump gets damaged by the Epstein matter, it would make it harder for Trump to run again in 2028 — something Trump obviously wants to do, something Vance is intelligent enough to see that Trump wants to do, and something Vance presumably doesn’t want Trump to do."
Trump and his supporters have frequently entertained the idea of him seeking a third term, even though he would be in his 80s by that time, and even though the Constitution expressly forbids a president seeking more than two terms. Some of Trump's backers have suggested there might be a "loophole" in the 22nd Amendment that involve him running for vice president and having the next president resign immediately, but experts have made clear this is not allowed either.