Trump doomed on Epstein vote as GOP senators poised to defy him in 'unusual' move: analyst

With the vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking files in Congress imminent, and its bipartisan passage in the House all but guaranteed, the action will turn to the Senate, where it will have to overcome the filibuster and get a significant amount of Republican support there as well.

But despite President Donald Trump lobbying hard to try to crush the vote, as more and more embarrassing details about his relationship with the deceased financier and sexual predator continue to trickle out, he is probably unable to stop it in the Senate either, analyst John Heilemann told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Thursday.

"No Republican is going to want to be seen covering up for the most vilified pedophile in recent American history," said anchor Joe Scarborough. "Then what are these Republican senators going to do when the White House starts saying, hey, kill the Epstein files? We want to keep them away from your voters, your constituents, the people that are going to vote for you in 2026. I don't think it's as open and closed of a political situation as some people are suggesting right now."

"13 Republican senators, sitting Republican senators up for reelection," said Heilemann. "You've got, in addition to that, a bunch of female Republican senators who aren't up for reelection right now ... the words of the Epstein survivors will be ringing in their ears. You have people like Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis, who both are retiring. It doesn't take that much work to to get to even if ... as Ali is reporting, if the threshold on this vote is going to be 60, it doesn't take that much work to get you to the number."

"If you start to put together the relatively moderate establishment Republicans, the female Republican senators, and Republican senators who are retiring and may not be totally in love with Donald Trump and kind of are looking for some way to, as they walk out the door, reclaim some of the reputation that they lost by by being overly loyal to him over the course of the first and second terms," said Heilemann. "I don't know, I might — maybe I'm a dreamer and obviously things are, It always turns out to be tough to get anything through the Senate on a 60-vote threshold."

"But this issue, Joe, to your point earlier, has cut through in a way that almost nothing else has," he added. "It is the rare bipartisan issue in the Trump era. It is a thing that is both overwhelmingly favored by the mainstream, by the overall electorate, by the general electorate, and also overwhelmingly favored in an intense and passionate way by the Republican MAGA base. That is a really unusual set of politics on this, and I just don't think as the temperature rises and the focus on this shifts to the Senate, I just don't think it's at all a foregone conclusion that this thing is going to die there."

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