Trump's new 'shockingly dumb' Epstein ploy will backfire with his base: column

In the wake of the bombshell Wall Street Journal report that revealed new details about the relationship between President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, the president has ordered the release of grand jury transcripts in an effort to exonerate himself, a ploy that one columnist described as “shocking dumb,” and one that will likely backfire.

“None of it makes sense,” writes The New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent in a column published Friday.

“Now that Trump wants the grand jury testimony, why won’t this only whet MAGA’s appetite more? Recall that the administration’s initial release of Epstein materials, which contained mostly publicly known stuff, only fueled more MAGA screams of a cover up.”

Trump has been under fire from some of his most dedicated supporters after last week, the Justice Department shut down further investigation into Epstein, alleged to have operated a human trafficking ring and maintained a client list of powerful individuals for blackmail purposes. Many MAGA faithful have been further enraged by Trump’s response to the outrage, who dismissed theories around Epstein as a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

After the WSJ report, however, Trump has given the all clear for Attorney General Pam Bondi to release select transcripts from a grand jury, though Sargent called the ploy “laughable,” given the trove of Epstein-related documents the DOJ is currently sitting on.

“As many pointed out, the files on Epstein, a sex offender who died in prison in 2019, contain all sorts of other materials, like videos, recordings, FBI witness interviews, and more that could incriminate Trump (or others) if he’s in there,” Sargent wrote.

“The new story is being manufactured before our eyes: Trump is for full disclosure, and his demand is totally owning Democrats (in Trump’s new mythology, Democrats created the files to manufacture a fake story against Trump). If the grand jury testimony doesn’t incriminate Trump (which it likely won’t), he will have been proven right.”

The issue, Sargent writes, is that Trump’s most diehard supporters, many of whom are deeply unsatisfied with Trump’s handling of the Epstein affair, will only grow hungrier for further releases, should Trump follow through on his pledge to release grand jury transcripts.

“If the testimony comes out and paints an unsatisfyingly incomplete picture, why wouldn’t the same anger erupt inside MAGA-world, perhaps more forcefully, what does Trump say at that point?” Sargent writes.

“Trump’s only way out of this is to seek full release of the Epstein files. But he won’t. And he can’t explain why he won’t. The more he calls for meaningless ‘releases’ that don’t provide real transparency, the more he will stoke conspiracism – and the more he’ll appear in on the elite coverup.”