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There’s no pretending otherwise: disgraced and deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein has hijacked Washington.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday announced he was starting the August recess a few days early to avoid the chamber having to vote on whether Congress should force the Justice Department to publish everything it has on Epstein, who was accused of running a sex ring of minors for the rich and powerful. The move amounted to Johnson veering toward an emergency off-ramp to avoid a toxic topic that has crippled President Donald Trump, and by extension most Republicans in Congress.
We are now in the second week of Trump trying and failing to get out from under Epstein’s shadow. At the Capitol, disagreements about how to pursue justice for Epstein’s alleged victims are erupting into screaming matches and quiet acrimony, and even some of Trump’s ardent apologists are finding themselves in a circular text chain asking if the White House gets just how boxed-in the President has become.
Ever since the Department of Justice and the FBI jointly released a memo on July 7 affirming that Epstein died by suicide in 2019 and that there is no “incriminating client list” in the government’s Epstein files, almost nothing else has been able to break through here. A revolt in the MAGAverse stalled votes in the House. The White House has been unable to reclaim control of the story, let alone take a victory lap on Trump’s tax- and spending-cuts law. Donors are simultaneously titillated by the tabloid fodder and disgusted that the long-promised disclosures have not been produced.
Trump and his allies have long fed the myth that Epstein’s life and death alike were pieces of a coverup to protect powerful players. It became something of a cottage industry, up there with Hillary Clinton’s emails and Joe Biden’s mental acuity. Now, Trumpists are finding the shrapnel does not spare them when the expectations and the reality are not neatly aligned.
Among more sober-minded Hill staffers, a variation of the same meme has become ubiquitous: you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
House Rules came to a standstill on Monday as Republican troublemakers demanded Congress move to force the Justice Department to publish what it has on Epstein. Democrats were more than happy to join that push and it became clear that Leadership had lost its leash on a movement that Trump has tried for two weeks to shut down.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California have joined forces on a discharge petition to force transparency on Epstein’s dossier, which would allow for a vote on the House floor over the objections of the GOP Leadership team. If that unlikely pair can cobble together 218 signatures on their petition, the measure could sidestep Johnson’s veto.
At the same time, a House Oversight subcommittee on Tuesday moved ahead with a motion from Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee to subpoena Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rather than keep playing with fire, Johnson sent everyone home. A hasty exit was seen as a better option than a slow-burning self-own.
This is not the summer Trump and his sycophants had planned. Epstein has pulled focus from One Big Beautiful tax- and spending-cut package the President signed on July 4 replete with a military flyover. Yet increasingly, signs in the Capitol are of a party at war with its own members. Even Trump’s Congressional allies have depleted their patience.
“I am tired of making history,” Johnson told reporters last week after holding open the vote on an ultimately successful cryptocurrency bill for a record nine hours as an Epstein sideshow invaded. “I just want a normal Congress.”
You’re hardly alone, Mr. Speaker.
But with Trump at the helm and increasingly backed into a corner by an Epstein saga that has split his typically lock-stepped Republican Party, it seems like the White House is turning to the oldies in an attempt to recapture the narrative. It is not working, and that means we once again are at the mercy of Trump’s whims.
Trump remains in open contempt of his base, which is peeved he promised a bombshell release of a celebrity client list of Epstein. He bemoaned that Jerome Powell was ever nominated to lead the nation’s central bank, a position Trump himself put Powell in. He’s even rewriting the recipe for Coke via social media posts, sending some suppliers racing to an unexpected sell-off. And, as this week began, he threatened Washington’s football team and its new stadium if it didn’t return to a former name that was ditched because it was demeaning to Native Americans.
Oh, and for good measure Sunday evening, he posted a video showing Democrats saying no one is above the law before cutting to what appears to be an A.I.-created clip of federal agents arresting Barack Obama in the Oval Office, pushing the former President to the ground before hauling him to a prison.
If Joe Biden were acting this way, there would be hearings.
The House is on its way home, and Senators are all but done, too. That leaves Trump here in Washington without any prospects of legislative movement until September, a stretch that typically gives administrations time to regroup and plot a push ahead of the Oct. 1 start of the next federal fiscal year. But instead of setting up a spending plan and plotting how to finish out the year, the White House is facing unending questions about Trump and his friendship with Epstein, which has never been in dispute. As GOP lawmakers rush to their flights out of Reagan, many are harboring the same hope: that their districts are not as consumed by the Epstein scandal as Washington has been. For those working in Washington, little else has seemed to matter.
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