Donald Trump killed the Jeffrey Epstein story on the right

MAGA propagandists care about Trump, not principles or victims

Written by Matt Gertz

Published

fox screengrab

President Donald Trump has succeeded in getting his media supporters to stop talking about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier. Prominent MAGA media figures ignored a wave of Epstein news on Tuesday, signaling that Trump’s pressure campaign has paid off with their silence — even as (or, perhaps, because) his own corrupt involvement in the story has grown.

The initial resistance but eventual submission of Fox stars, Newsmax hosts, and MAGA influencers demonstrates that the Trumpist right’s only defining principle is that the president is good and his position at any time is the correct one — everything else can be tossed over the side at his command. 

MAGA media figures lashed out at the Trump administration in July after the FBI and Justice Department released a memo which debunked foundational claims of the right’s Epstein narrative. Trump, who has a host of connections to Epstein, responded to that criticism by demanding his allies move on from the story and offering up new common enemies for them to focus on instead. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ made a series of shady moves related to the case. First, the DOJ attorney who successfully prosecuted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2022 was fired. Then the department’s No. 2, former Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche, interviewed Maxwell in prison with clemency from her old friend the president all but dangling over the conversation. The Trump administration subsequently transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security prison camp and released transcript and audio from the interview, in which the convicted sex trafficker asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting.”

Nothing to see here!

On Tuesday, members of Congress returned to Washington following the summer recess and brought with them a passel of Epstein news:

  • The House Oversight Committee met behind closed doors with six women who say they were sexually trafficked by Epstein. 
  • Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed a discharge petition to force a vote on his bill with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) requiring the release of files related to Epstein that have not been publicly released.
  • House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY), in an apparent effort to forestall momentum around the bill, put 34,000 pages of Epstein files online — but as reporters and committee Democrats quickly noted, the documents included redactions and the overwhelming majority had already been released.
  • Massie accused Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) of orchestrating a cover-up of the Epstein story. 

The influx of Epstein news, combined with a planned press conference on Wednesday featuring 10 of the disgraced financier’s victims, led Politico’s Playbook to declare this “the story Trump can’t kill.” 

But while mainstream news outlets are providing plenty of coverage of the Epstein case, many Republican voters are likely not hearing about any of it. The propagandists they listen to prioritize remaining in Trump’s good graces over everything else, and they are largely following his command to sweep Epstein and his victims under the rug.

Fox host Laura Ingraham signaled she planned to cover the Epstein story, teasing the Oversight Committee’s document release at the top of her Tuesday broadcast. “We'll bring you any breaking details as they come,” she said.

But Ingraham never returned to the story. And her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld did not mention Epstein that night. On Wednesday, while CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other networks carried the press conference with Epstein’s victims live, Fox instead aired a few minutes of remarks from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) before cutting away. The Trump administration even helped the network counterprogram, providing an appointee for Fox to interview.

Fox isn’t the only MAGA outlet giving the Epstein story short shrift. 

Newsmax’s prime-time hosts — including Greg Kelly, whose show took a bizarre pro-Maxwell turn last month — also did not mention Epstein on Tuesday.

And several MAGA commentators who initially criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein story after the release of the DOJ/FBI memo did not mention Epstein on Tuesday on their X accounts, including Tim Pool, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec.

Trump told them to stop caring about Epstein and his victims, and after some initial resistance, they’ve done it. Instead, the MAGA right’s most prominent figures are focusing on stories the president wants covered in the way he wants them discussed. They are spending their energy greasing the skids for Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago and praising the military strike he ordered on a vessel the administration claims was carrying Venezuelan gang members and drugs. 

Perhaps the stories Epstein’s victims tell at Wednesday’s press conference will force these people to find their consciences. But for now, it appears any effort to inform Republican voters about developments in the Epstein story will run up against the reality that their preferred news providers have dropped the story at Trump’s insistence.