Early on Thursday morning, the beleaguered attorney general Pam Bondi attempted to escape the fury over the Epstein files controversy by visiting Alcatraz prison. Ostensibly, she was on a mission to further explore President Trump’s idea of reopening the barren and isolated island off the coast of San Francisco, which has served as a tourism attraction for decades, as a serviceable prison.
But the timing of the trip looked like a none-too-subtle bid to shift the spotlight and the collective attention span from the question that has been gnawing at the conscience of Trump’s core Make America Great Again support base for the past week. Why won’t they release the files?
California’s governor Gavin Newsom, one of the most openly combative 2028 Democratic election possibilities, quickly fired out a caustic post about the visit. “Pam Bondi will reopen Alcatraz the same day that Trump lets her release the Epstein files. So ... never.”
At lunchtime on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that president Trump will make a visit to Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland, all the better to blow the cobwebs away and cement the budding US-UK trade agreement through a sit down with Keir Starmer.
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In the same briefing, it was revealed that President Trump had undergone testing for swelling in his lower legs. A recently published photograph of his visibly swollen ankles had provoked a predictable fever of online speculation. Yes, he had vascular swelling. No, it did not impact his ability to travel or to work.
The series of events was the latest attempt by the White House to quell or detract from the internal revolt in a week that saw Trump lose his grip on both the credulity and loyalty of a significant percentage of his most fervent support base.
Throughout last year’s riotous election, Trump thrived on instinct rather than long-term strategy, slaloming through the legal travails of last spring before seeing off Joe Biden, emerging unscathed from an assassination attempt and ultimately defeating Kamala Harris in the November election.
He may have been generally aware that many of his key administration picks – including his vice-president JD Vance, his FBI director Kash Patel, the assistant director Dan Bongino – had, along with an assortment of prominent Maga voices, repeatedly and vociferously called for the release of the Epstein files during the Biden presidency.
At that time, it was good sport to stoke the conspiracy theory that, within the investigation documents on Epstein, the wealthy financier with a murky past who took his own life in prison in 2019 while awaiting a sex trafficking trial, was proof of the Q-Anon whispers of a deep state paedophile ring and a bombshell client list of showbiz and political elites. Nobody close to Trump stopped to consider the consequences of his administration declining to make the files public, as promised.
Last weekend, the subject dominated the Turning Point young conservative conference in Tampa. The consternation prompted a 400-word Truth Social post from Trump, an exhortation to read from the same hymn sheet.
“We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.”
It was a classic Trump play: to audaciously flip an accusation into a counteraccusation, suddenly presenting the documents his support base believe would incriminate the Democratic elites as having been concocted by those same elites.
For once, his audience was sceptical. The heavyweight Maga-sphere show hosts – Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk – were aghast. Several prominent Republicans, including House speaker Mike Johnson, expressed their belief that the files should be released. By Wednesday, Trump was out of patience, firing out an embittered post blaming some Republicans for their gullibility at falling for yet another Democratic scam. “Let those weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success because I don’t want their support any more.”
One of the inarticulable mysteries about Donald Trump’s political revolution concerns the question of how a quintessential 1980s new-money New York businessman, with no interest or in-depth travel experience through the US interior, somehow intuited the various vulnerabilities and dissatisfactions of disillusioned and disenfranchised people across those states, found the right words and messaging to reach them and transformed their grievances and wishes into an ultraloyal movement at lightning speed. It was his separating quality and for the past decade, he has been above their reproach.
Although much of the blame for keeping the Epstein files under wraps has been focused on Pam Bondi, deep down even the staunchest of Trump loyalists know that if the president wanted the documents released, they would be released. More troubling is the prospect that there is nothing there to release: that Vance and company had been cheerfully toying with their belief system in demanding full disclosure on the Epstein findings. And the least palatable alternative is that there is something within the documents that Trump does not want to enter the public domain.
A March NBC poll found that 36 per cent of all registered US voters considered themselves to be Maga supporters – almost a 10 per cent jump in a year. Seventy-one per cent of all Republicans now identify with Maga Republicanism since Trump’s re-election.
To many among this number, the reversal on the Epstein files represents a breach of covenant. The Republican administration’s belief system may be entirely malleable but one of the characteristics of the Maga movement is that its disciples are devout. A collective desperation for someone with a cohesive message was precisely what Trump sensed when he began to harness those disparate energies while promising to restore to their lives whatever those Americans believed themselves to have lost.
Labelling the Democrats as responsible for the border crisis, for the scourge of immigration, for inflation, for wokeism and elitism, for abandoning their cities and towns: all made for riveting and effective political theatre. The Epstein files resided as a kind of vague gift that would someday be presented to them. What Trump underestimated was just how wedded his base are to a conspiracy theory that he may well privately consider daft. Now, he has called them “stupid”. He has let them down.
Trump has, over his lifetime, proven himself to be darkly brilliant at turning potential foes into allies – not least with his conversion of one-time Democratic aristocracy Robert F Kennedy Jr into an election prop and Republican cabinet member.
But infuriatingly for him, Jeffrey Epstein, a social acquaintance from the 1990s, is six years dead but not quite gone from his life. Disillusioned supporters have posted videos where they are burning and even blow-torching their Make America Great Again caps. The images are symbolic of a new crisis for Trump.
On this issue at least, he has shattered the faith of his church. He has lost control of the Epstein narrative. For the first time since he cast his spell, he can feel the eyes and thoughts of his people looking at him with something other than spiritual devotion. “All over,” as he wrote, “a guy who never dies”.
Elon Musk, another former friend, is gleefully reposting the demands for full transparency. Congressman Thomas Massie, virtually a rogue Republican to Trump at this stage, is leading a crusade to force a House vote to release the records. By Thursday night, Trump had returned to Truth Social promising to sue Rupert Murdoch and his publication the Wall Street Journal for reporting on an apparent birthday note from Trump to Epstein which, Trump stressed, he warned them was fake.
Then came the volte-face, the news that Trump had directed Pam Bondi to seek the release of the grand jury testimony relating to Epstein’s sex-trafficking case. The president said on Truth Social he had authorised the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
All the while, the old photographs of Epstein and Trump together in happier times are out there, recirculating on the social media streams. There is scarcely an image where Jeffrey Epstein is not smirking.
