“On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room.” Thus begins the latest article based on New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman’s and Jonathan Swan’s upcoming book about the Trump White House. The officials, according to the Times’ reporting, did not use the Situation Room to discuss a terrorist threat or a looming war, but “a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.” Haberman and Swan chronicle how many senior Trump officials thought the issue would blow over with his MAGA base, only for Trump to reluctantly sign a bill ordering the files’ release.

The same day the Times published Haberman and Swan’s article, Rep. Nancy Mace, one of just a few Republicans who forced a vote on that bill, finished fifth in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Republican voters may have convinced the White House last year that they wanted to see some accountability regarding Epstein, but their actions since have shown considerably less interest in justice.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found 66% of Republicans agreed that “the federal government is hiding information about the clients of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.”

Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted for the book, Haberman and Swan report that “senior officials, including [White House chief of staff Susie] Wiles and [then-deputy chief of staff James] Blair, were initially unconvinced about the reach of the Epstein crisis.” They believed the story was “amplified by noisy online influencers who didn’t represent a meaningful bloc of voters.” Others, like Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel, insisted the story carried far more weight.

The latter group was correct. First, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handout of binders to conservative influencers backfired when it turned out almost all of the binders’ contents had been previously released. A July 2025 Justice Department memo attempting to close the case made things even worse. “By late summer,” Haberman and Swan write, “it was plainly apparent to the president’s top aides that the Epstein saga was not the same as the countless other crises they had weathered during their service to Trump.” In November, a discharge petition for a House bill to force the release of the files reached 218 signatures – 214 Democrats and four Republicans. Within a week, Trump reluctantly signed the bill.

“The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see,” Haberman and Swan conclude. “He could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.” The Justice Department released millions of documents, with embarrassing revelations for Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Just this week, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found 66% of Republicans agreed that “the federal government is hiding information about the clients of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein,” while 82% agreed the files “show that powerful people in the U.S. are rarely held accountable for their actions.”

But Mace will not be in the next Congress; she says her push for the Epstein files bill cost her Trump’s endorsement. Nor will Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., the main GOP mover behind the discharge petition; he lost to a Trump-backed opponent in the most expensive primary in House history. A third signer, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., resigned earlier this year. Only Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Col., will remain – but not for lack of trying of Trump’s part. The president threatened to withdraw his endorsement of Boebert after she campaigned with Massie, but the filing deadline for Colorado’s primaries has passed.

Each of the three departures, in isolation, can be blamed on factors besides the Epstein files. Massie frequently broke with his party on many issues, and pro-Israel groups spent millions against him. Greene clashed with Trump on tariffs and foreign policy, and by the end seemed most interested in securing her congressional pension. Mace faced difficult odds in the gubernatorial primary, and public incidents like a confrontation with Charleston International Airport staffers did not help her campaign.

Does that mean Trump will weather this storm? It’s too early to say.

Taken together, though, the pattern is impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, more than two million Epstein files are still unreleased — and lawmakers have questioned the extensive redactions to the 3.5 million that have been released. And in the same Reuters/Ipsos poll where 66% of Republican voters say the federal government is currently concealing information about Epstein’s clients, 69% agree that “it’s time for the country to move on from talking about the Epstein files.”

For months, it seemed that the files might be the rare instance where the Republican base broke with the president. But the primaries suggest otherwise.

Does that mean Trump will weather this storm? It’s too early to say: Democrats are likely to take at least one house of Congress this year, and the investigative powers that come with the majority. But Republican voters are happy to let him captain the ship, even if it sinks.

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