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TRUMP’S EPSTEIN HUMILIATION GROWS  
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William Kristol
November 17, 2025
The xxxxxx
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_ The president saw defeat and ran. But that doesn’t mean the fight
over releasing the files is over. _

, credit: Donald Teel / Unsplash License

 

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_ [[link removed]]_ 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._ 

 

* Jeffrey Epstein
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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