The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren’t.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,” Donald Trump scolded a reporter who asked about Epstein in July. Trump went on to suggest that the question was a “desecration” of the memory of those who had recently died in floods in the Texas Hill Country.
It was a strangely aggressive reaction from the man whose most fervent supporters had spent years talking about Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison before his last trial, in which he faced charges for the trafficking of minors. (His associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex-trafficking charges.) During the 2024 campaign, Trump, when asked, pledged to release documents related to the investigation, commonly referred to as the “Epstein files.” A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal
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