Why Trump’s Epstein Files Scandal May Not Be Hurting Him After All

More than three weeks after the Epstein files story reemerged with a bang when the Department of Justice and the FBI announced there was nothing to investigate, the story continues to draw enormous media attention and wide-ranging speculation. Despite some complaints that the media coverage is excessive, the story simply won’t go away. For one thing, the co-star of the story, President Donald Trump, won’t shut up about it and keeps bringing it up in alarming ways (e.g., treating Epstein’s most famous victim, Virginia Giuffre, as a piece of property that Epstein “stole” from him). For another, he and his administration keep taking steps (notably the prison negotiations with Ghislaine Maxwell) that stink of a cover-up in the works. To put it another way, if there’s so much smoke surrounding this case, is it really possible there’s no fire?

So major coverage of the Epstein files story is entirely justified. But it’s a separate question as to whether all this coverage is having any real-world political impact at this point.

It has become an iron tenet of contemporary politics that developments that would massively affect the standing in public opinion of most politicians have little or no effect, positively or negatively, on Donald Trump. He’s the most galvanizing public figure in living memory, and his vast history of controversy and scandal appear to have made him as impervious to breaking news as a cockroach is impervious to radiation. And as Nate Silver explains after looking at every bit of available public-opinion research, there just isn’t much specific evidence that the Epstein files scandal and cover-up are moving the numbers. Indeed, when it comes to the more specific claim that the “crisis” over Epstein is wreaking havoc in Trump’s MAGA base, the evidence suggests strongly otherwise:

I asked Eli [McKown-Dawson] to pull data on partisan splits in approval ratings, comparing the most recent poll from each firm against the last survey from the same firm completed entirely before July 7. Among Republicans, Trump’s approval has actually ticked up a point since Epstein became a focal point, while his disapproval rating has declined by one point.

Turns out Trump’s approval rating among independents and Democrats has barely budged since July 7 either. And as Silver points out, despite all the focus on Epstein, other issues affecting Trump’s popularity have been in the news too:

Epstein isn’t the only story that you’d expect to place downward pressure on Trump’s numbers. There’s been a new round of tariffs. The One Big Beautiful Bill passed and it wasn’t popular either. Trump bombed Iran, though that came in June before the Epstein story resurfaced.

There remains a strong case that voters are concerned about the economy and the cost of living, but that everything else is priced in.

Because heavy Epstein coverage is displacing other damaging-to-Trump stories, Nate is skeptical that more incessant coverage will start hurting Tump:

[A]s Bryan Walsh writes at Vox, the Epstein story crowds out others that are more important and/or also potentially problematic for Trump. The constraints in news coverage aren’t what they used to be when most journalism is consumed online rather than in the print edition. But newsrooms have bandwidth that can only flex up so much, and consumers have a limited time and financial budgets. If they’re reading about Epstein, that means they’re not reading as much about other things. Epstein might be a bad story for Trump, but there are lots of bad stories for Trump. What is its value above a replacement-level day in the news cycle?

This obviously goes out the window, though, if there really is fire beneath the smoke, if the White House keeps engaging in cover-up tactics, and if the story won’t go away because the president himself keeps feeding it oxygen. And for what it’s worth, Trump officials are reportedly worried about losing a slice of his MAGA base over the scandal. But absent the emergence of pornographic images featuring the leader of the Free World, reactions to the Epstein story will likely continue to polarize, particularly if Trump continues to feed his base the bloodiest red meat of Obama or Biden or Clinton revenge narratives, stemming the appetite for Epstein files revelations. Nate Silver thinks the whole story may be remembered much like Russiagate, an obsessive elite liberal preoccupation that appeared to make voters simply confirm whatever they thought about Trump before. We have no way of knowing that until the loose threads are all tracked down and this chapter of the Epstein story has a beginning, a middle, and, at long last, an end.