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A reader of Wednesday’s [ [link removed] ]Off Message [ [link removed] ] pointed me to this Wednesday night exchange on MSNBC between Stephanie Ruhle and Mark McKinnon, the former-Republican political strategist.
Ruhle asks, in essence, why Donald Trump has been so solicitous of the child predator Ghislaine Maxwell, and why Maxwell thinks Trump might offer her clemency, and McKinnon muses that the Trump-Epstein scandal will ultimately fizzle.
I don’t think it’s fatal politically, because again, how many people out there are surprised today that Donald Trump was in these emails? I think very few, really. And I think the thing that Democrats have to be careful is prosecute this to the fullest extent, get them on their heels, but get back to affordability. This is not going to win the election.
I don’t mean to pick on McKinnon, or anyone in particular. I only mean to stress that Democrats in Congress are engulfed in this conventional wisdom, same as every time they’re tempted by an explosive Trump scandal. And they need to hear the alternative case.
It’d be nice to think Democrats have noticed that downplaying Trump’s scandals to better emphasize kitchen-table issues has a poor track record. And to their credit, they’ve struck a decent balance these past few months between economic appeals and the drumbeat for Epstein disclosure.
But I’m familiar with this pattern, how apt Democrats are to rush back to safe issues when partisan confrontation gets rough and tumble. And so I want to run forward the logic of “get[ting] back to affordability,” how it prefigures another surrender—another demonstration of weakness—right before the next presidential election.
What would it mean, in practice, for Democrats to “get [Republicans] on their heels, but get back to affordability”? I think the advice means something like: Don’t leave voters with the impression that you’re more concerned with the contents of the Epstein files (or any lurid matter) than with their material struggles. To the extent you have agenda-setting power, use it to drive public attention to issues like health care, rather than the Epstein files.
I confess to a general skepticism of this line of strategic thinking. I’ve seen Democrats run on health-care appeals cycle after cycle and lose about half the time. I’ve seen elections turn on the politics of an overseas Ebola outbreak and an email-server. It frequently matters what’s on voters minds, how they understand the parties and their leaders, in the moments before close elections, and it’s thus important to exploit issues that get people talking. Policy almost never gets people talking.
I’m particularly skeptical in this case. You can have a very low opinion of the electorate, of the moral intuitions of swing voters, and still think they’d vote against a pedophile even if they thought he was a better steward of the economy, or a safe vote to defend their cultural values. This is how Democrat Doug Jones became a senator in Alabama—not because he talked about affordability, but because Roy Moore was a child predator.
Now imagine we had no pertinent recent history—that Democrats could only assess their options from the politics of the moment. What do the politics of the moment tell us about how Republicans perceive their own vulnerabilities?
“Getting back to affordability” means trying to divide Republicans over economic policy: Legislation reclaiming tariff authority would make things more affordable. Stubbornly above-target inflation suggests deficit reduction would help, too. Restoring Affordable Care Act subsidies would certainly make health insurance more affordable for 10-plus million people.
How many Republicans have run scared from votes on those issues? How many GOP votes would you expect for legislation to increase rich people’s taxes? How many Republicans have defected by voting to rescind Trump’s lawless tariffs?
By contrast: Having failed to abet Trump’s coverup, how many House Republicans do we expect to vote to release the Epstein files next week? 50? 100? If gaining the political upper hand entails uniting your own party and dividing the opposition, the numbers tell a simple story: Epstein is more fruitful terrain than affordability.
To rebut the obvious rejoinder, nobody on my side of this argument thinks Democrats should roll their eyes and pivot to Epstein when constituents ask them about the cost of things. We should all want elected Democrats and Democratic candidates to be empathetic, cognizant of real-world concerns, and reasonably fluent in matters of policy.
But there’s a world of difference between an election Democrats win by pressing all of their advantages—treating Epstein the way Republicans treated Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails—and one they win by treating Trump scandals as of secondary or tertiary importance. By “getting back to affordability.”
It’s the difference between one future in which Democrats successfully pry the Epstein files loose and another in which Trump says “no” and Democrats give up, or file a lawsuit that won’t be resolved for years, and move on to messaging votes.
Which seems more plausible: An “affordability” election that compels Trump to reverse the terms of the OBBBA? Or an Epstein election that compels an end to the coverup?
Yes, Democrats should promise to wield majorities to help Americans afford things. But they should level with the public, too: They can’t force Trump to sign legislation. It’s not illegal for him to veto good policy in favor of the bad laws he’s already signed. Democrats can, by contrast, create legal jeopardy for anyone who continues the Epstein coverup in defiance of the will of the voters. They can win the Epstein fight without Trump having to sign his name to anything.
Recent evidence suggests Trump and the GOP badly want to bury the Epstein files, and will go to incredible lengths to do so, but aren’t confident they’ll succeed in the long run. They denied hundreds of thousands of New Mexico citizens due representation for 50 days to elongate their Epstein coverup.
Trump has leaned on Republican officials across the country to gerrymander every district under their control, in the forlorn hope of holding the House next year. Why? Not because Trump fears Democratic appropriations negotiators, or having to veto health-care bills, but because he’s scared of oversight.
His efforts are highly corrosive, but they are promising insofar as they reveal desperation. At some level Trump seems to know there are limits to his ability to stonewall Congress, ignore public opinion, defy subpoenas, violate criminal laws. Trump could order DOJ to destroy Epstein file evidence. I’d bet an irresponsible amount of money that he has already barked this order at Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, but to no avail. If Trump were dictator, he’d be fearless of the Epstein files, because they’d no longer exist. In the real world, the administration is behaving as if all the evidence remains intact, as if they know destroying it would backfire, because too many people already know the truth.
These are not the actions of a crook who thinks he’s all powerful; they’re the actions of a crook who knows he’s vulnerable.
Democrats have happily held their own in the gerrymandering fight. That is to their credit. But they could be clearer about why Trump is so desperate to rig the House elections: To keep the Epstein files concealed. And if that’s how he sees the stakes, so be it. The midterms will be a referendum on whether Trump’s pedophilia coverup should be allowed to succeed.
I’ve tried to stress the importance of planning.
We’ve seen twice this year—first in March, then in this most recent shutdown—what happens when Democrats enter a confrontation without adopting a sustainable posture or establishing achievable terms of victory: They quit the fight, and incur the wrath of their own voters.
If they win the midterms anyhow, they will face all kinds of similar dilemmas over how to wield power, how to respond to Trump’s intransigence, and they should be planning for that now [ [link removed] ]. The easiest step they can take is to establish a public consensus before the election that the midterms will be the final word on the Epstein matter.
Do Democrats really want to enter divided government with the meaning of the election unclear? After spending a year treating Trump’s corruption as immaterial? Where Trump can concede $20 billion in health-insurance subsidies and call it even with the voters?
If so, they should listen to McKinnon and all the other people regurgitating the same advice. But if they want to enter power with the upper hand, having created a presumption that the election will determine the fate of the Epstein files, then they need to wean themselves off the affordability narcotic [ [link removed] ] and remember that they are the opposition party, and this is a multi-front war.

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