At 9:15 p.m. ET yesterday, Donald Trump threw in the towel, writing on Truth Social: “The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE.”
This is, of course, a lie. Everything Trump did in recent months shows that he cared deeply about not releasing the Department of Justice’s Jeffrey Epstein files. I’m sure he still cares a lot. But he’s now recognized defeat, at least a temporary defeat. And so he’s changed his tune.
It’s worth recalling how consistently and how insistently Trump fought the release of these files. In early July, his Attorney General and FBI Director announced they’d completed an “exhaustive review” of the files, after which they informed Trump of what he surely wanted to hear—that they had “found no basis to revisit the disclosure” of any of the Epstein materials.
Ever since, Trump has attacked those who called for the files’ release. Most notably, he tried to pressure the four Republican signers of the discharge petition to force a floor vote on the legislation mandating their release. This culminated in the remarkable spectacle of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert being summoned to the White House Situation Room last Wednesday to meet with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to get her arm twisted. But the four Republican holdouts—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina—held firm.
Meanwhile Trump’s lapdog, Speaker Mike Johnson, sent the House home early in late July to stop a growing Republican revolt on Epstein. He then kept the House out of session during the government shutdown, in part to avoid having to swear in the newly-elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who would be the decisive 218th signatory of the discharge petition. But the shutdown ended, the House came back, and on Wednesday Grijalva was sworn in. She went straight to the well of the House to provide the signature needed to bring the petition to the floor.
Meanwhile, in the course of the last four-and-a-half months, we learned more about why Trump cared about information coming out on his relationship with Epstein. The revelations ranged from the salacious card in Epstein’s birthday book to the recently released 2019 email from Epstein, in which he writes that “of course knew about the girls.” What’s striking is that none of these revelations led Trump to make the judgment: Well, the worst is already out there, so I might as well order the files’ release. So one has to suspect that Trump thought or knew that there would be even worse to come from the release of the Justice Department files. And one has to suspect that’s why he fought it.
But as House Republicans prepared to desert en masse, Trump last night acknowledged defeat. The House will pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, likely tomorrow. The Senate will very likely follow suit quickly now that Trump has backed down. We will then see if Trump will sign the measure.
Of course, were he to sign it, Trump, along with Bondi and Patel, would no doubt work on minimizing the scale of the defeat. The Justice Department could withhold materials and limit the scope of the release of the files. And it will be hard to know what isn’t being released.
So this fight is by no means over. Democrats and the truth-seeking Republicans will have to keep the pressure on—by cross-checking the files that are released with what survivors and others know to be in them, by insisting on a full accounting of what hasn’t been released, by demanding hearings and testimony from Bondi and Patel under oath, and the like. And this is to say nothing of the fact that various documents and records might have conveniently gone missing in the course of Bondi and Patel’s exhaustive review.
Given how hard Trump has fought the release, it would be very foolish to assume that all will go smoothly now. There is material in there that Trump did not want us to see and still does not want us to see. So this is nowhere close to the end. It is merely the end of the beginning of the fight for full release of the Epstein files.
But we can draw lessons from this still incomplete and uncertain victory.
1) It was easier in this case to fracture the MAGA coalition than to get “responsible” Republicans to defect from Trump. The four Republicans who signed the discharge petition are not Republican “moderates” or “institutionalists.” Greene and Boebert are true believers. Many of their beliefs are foolish or deplorable. But they showed far more courage or at least stubbornness than all their more mainstream counterparts who have proved to be weaklings under pressure.
So: It may be more fruitful in the effort to weaken Trump to find and exploit fractures in the MAGA coalition than to try to find moderates to step up.
2) The four Republicans who held firm deserve a lot of credit. But they only were able to make a difference because the entire Democratic conference signed the discharge petition. And the entire conference signed up because some—mainly California’s Rep. Ro Khanna—insisted on seizing the issue.
I’m sure that Khanna and others were constantly being told by Democratic “strategists” not to let Epstein “distract” from the focus on “kitchen table” issues. I can’t even count how many meetings and conferences I’ve been at over the past months at which the Epstein issue was either downplayed or ignored, as Democratic consultants went over their polling data on health care. When some of us would politely—or sometimes not so politely!—point out that releasing the Epstein files polled even better than saving Medicaid, we were pretty much ignored. And we were sometimes privately reprimanded for indulging in this distraction.
We were also reminded time and again that Democrats are in the minority, and that it was important to stress to their supporters the limits of what they could do. But it turns out that Democrats are not powerless! They can sometimes make a difference. There are some levers of power—such as discharge petitions!—that are available. One has to pull on all those levers, and one often doesn’t know ahead of time which one might work.
So: Democrats should ignore much of the advice of the Democratic consultant-pollster-industrial complex. And in general, fighting is superior to finding reasons not to fight. You don’t score any goals if you don’t take any shots, even if they seem at first like long shots.
3) Finally, what we’ve already seen of the Epstein emails offers a remarkable window into the bipartisan decadence and depravity of many of our elites. Democrats should run against not just Trump and the GOP, but against elites in general in 2026, and I dare say in 2028.
So: For those of us who’d prefer centrist policies to leftist ones, we need centrist candidates that are also credibly anti-elitist. There will be no market for a return to the good old days of the Clintons and their like. Not when they can be found next to Trump in the Epstein files canon.
We shouldn’t overstate this moment. There are many, many challenges ahead on every front. Indeed, the chances of an intensification of the Trump administration’s authoritarianism at home and abroad may have increased because of Trump’s forced retreat on the Epstein files.
Ten months into Trump’s second term, we are nowhere near turning the corner in the fight against Trump and Trumpism. But that turning point may, just may, be coming into sight.
William Kristol is Editor at Large, The xxxxxx. Director, Defending Democracy Together. Host, Conversations with Bill Kristol.
You may have noticed that sh*t has gotten weird the last few years. The xxxxxx was founded to provide analysis and reporting in defense of America’s liberal democracy. That’s it. That’s the mission. The xxxxxx was founded in 2019 by Sarah Longwell, Charlie Sykes, and Bill Kristol.
