MAGA’s Epstein Fixation Isn’t About Justice, It’s About Revenge

House Republicans care less about delivering justice to this sexual predator's underage victims and more about punishing their political enemies

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When Donald Trump’s second term began, it was unimaginable that Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker who died by suicide while in prison during Trump’s first term, would posthumously haunt his presidency more than anything else from Trump’s past.

Trump certainly didn’t imagine it. When his own Department of Justice declared, in July, that the “Epstein client list” did not exist, he seemed genuinely rattled by the blowback. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump snapped at a reporter. “This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.” Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson was so worried that a vote on releasing the Epstein files wouldn’t go the president’s way that he sent members to summer recess early.

Despite the president’s distemper, the issue won’t die down. A Wall Street Journal report published in late September detailed the Trump administration’s consternation: “White House officials said they underestimated how sticky the issue would prove to be, believing it would blow over and people would move on.”

It is easy to see why Trump wants everyone, particularly his supporters, to forget about “this creep,” who had actually been his friend since the late ’80s. Epstein cultivated connections in the highest echelons of politics, business, and academia while running a sex racket with underage girls—some as young as 14. Allegedly, Epstein paid them to perform sex acts on himself and other powerful figures, while encouraging these girls to recruit others, maintaining a vast network of abuse. In 2019, he was charged with two counts related to the sex trafficking of minors.

But it would be a mistake to think that the MAGA right’s years-long obsession with Epstein stems primarily from concern about his victims or child sex abuse. Those are genuinely worthy causes, but the conduct of MAGA’s elected representatives in Congress and others shows that, for them, this sordid and tragic saga is first and foremost about exposing establishment elites, particularly Democrats, as hypocritical and corrupt—not delivering justice to victims of sex trafficking or protecting children.

Children as Political Props

For Trump, the Epstein issue outlived its usefulness on Election Day 2024. During the presidential campaign, Trump rode the hysteria in the MAGA movement over Epstein. But he evidently expected that once Democrats were shut out of government, coverup accusations would lose their sting and his base would move on.

That didn’t happen. After Trump’s DOJ essentially said, “there’s nothing to see here,” the reaction from MAGA world was so intense that the administration convened special strategy sessions in the White House’s Situation Room to plan a response. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who as a podcaster had been an ardent conspiracy monger, especially about Epstein, even threatened to quit, seemingly concerned that the backlash was damaging his MAGA credentials—despite the fact that earlier in the summer he had affirmed that Trump’s buddy had in fact killed himself.

Once Congress reconvened in the fall, some of the most steadfastly MAGA figures within the House GOP—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina—along with all 213 of their Democratic colleagues, moved closer to a discharge petition to force Trump’s DOJ to release additional information about the Epstein case. As part of its pressure campaign, Massie, Greene, Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and others held an emotional press conference with Epstein survivors on Capitol Hill last month.

But Speaker Johnson continues to thwart them by shuffling his feet on seating Democrat Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who won a special election in her state and would cast the last vote needed to pass Massie’s bill. Johnson has used the government shutdown as a kind of second recess to keep Grijalva from being seated to prevent Massie’s petition from passing.

Johnson’s actions are in keeping with the White House’s recent lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for publishing the president’s birthday card to Epstein in which he alluded approvingly, it seems, to his friend’s sexual interest in underage girls.

Why doesn’t the Massie wing simply fall back as the party leadership so ardently wishes? Because it has been hoping to prove its long-standing belief that a corrupt nexus of the Washington establishment and “the deep state” constantly conspires to let politically powerful politicians and their cronies get away with criminality and depravity. In its bonkers litany of conspiracies (more on that later), the Epstein case offers it its best shot at vindication. So it was counting on Trump and his need to court his populist base to help it fully blow the lid off this scandal.

As Greene has noted:

If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People. If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.

But the trouble is that to “take down every enemy of The People” would mean those in Trump’s orbit, too. Trump, an inveterate playboy in his youth, was no foreigner to the corrupt establishment that Epstein had so assiduously cultivated. So it is hardly a stretch to imagine that there are MAGA and Trump backers who might well be implicated if the whole pandora’s box is opened.

This is a price that the conspiracy-mongering MAGA wing is willing to pay but not Trump’s congressional lackey, Johnson. The hardline MAGA House Republicans ought to be commended for not letting their leaders brush this issue under the rug. But the fact of the matter is that, with the possible exception of Mace, who has professed to being a victim of sexual abuse herself and may genuinely be concerned with securing justice for Epstein’s victims, the MAGA hardliners are mainly motivated by tearing down the political establishment on the wager that far more of their political enemies will get burned than their own.

MAGA’s Conspiracists

And there is no enemy more loathed than the Clintons. The right-wing thirst for revenge against the duo is insatiable. Indeed, the MAGA obsession with Epstein has its genesis in the fact that former President Bill Clinton is known to have flown on Epstein’s private jet dubbed “Lolita Express.” Also, Epstein donated to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign along with donations to other Democratic candidates and committees.

All that is sordid enough, but for the conspiracists, that barely scratches the surface. They have also spun the absurdity of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory arising from the 2016 Wikileaks release of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails, that alleged that Hillary was running a pedophile ring from a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. This culminated in an incident in which a man armed with a rifle drove from North Carolina to the pizza place and fired shots because he was convinced that Hillary was holding children in a dungeon inside.

A consistent throughline within MAGA politics involves high-ranking elites and other enemies of MAGA preying on children. “Groomer” is the most potent accusation in their arsenal against their political opponents.

But it’s not just individual figures that are implicated in MAGA’s pedophilia smear campaigns. They castigate entire groups in the “liberal” establishment. QAnon is constantly spinning tales about global elites sexually exploiting children. Tucker Carlson has baselessly claimed that Epstein is a Mossad agent in an effort to slander Israel and Jews. Massie has jumped in on Tucker-style antisemitism by sharing a post on X claiming that Trump is stonewalling on Epstein because the pedophile was an intelligence asset for U.S. and Israel. Massie, incidentally, has a taste for conspiracy theories and has been an ardent peddler of the “fedsurrection” theory, which maintains that Jan. 6 was an inside job perpetrated by the deep state.

The MAGA movement has worked to implicate other groups in child sexual abuse as a way of achieving political ends. Perceiving teachers, counselors, and librarians as threats, MAGA has repeatedly accused them of being “groomers.” Project 2025 claimed that teachers and librarians are distributing porn and sexualizing children and called for their imprisonment and registration as sex offenders.

The GOP Looks the Other Way

But there are other indications that for MAGA none of this is ultimately about Epstein’s victims. If it were, the abused women, many of whom were minor then, would feature prominently in their crusade. But beyond the lone press conference, they have been relegated to the sidelines. Jess Michaels, a survivor advocate, has pointed out that “survivor voices” are notable by their absence among those whom the House GOP recently subpoenaed to testify about the Epstein case. Instead, the list of the subpoenaed is overwhelmingly comprised of Trump’s opponents—a naked attempt to divert attention from Trump’s own relationship with Epstein and his handling of the case and focus it onto Democrats’ involvement with the predator. See if you can spot the common thread in most of those subpoenaed by House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, from his own early Aug. press release: “Bill and Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Alberto Gonzales.”

Also, consider the MAGA reaction to the sweet deal that the Trump DOJ offered Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s acolyte who is not only accused of helping him run the minor sex ring but also molesting the girls herself. She is currently serving a 20-year sentence, but after a full day of questioning by Trump’s DOJ in July, she was moved to a cushier prison facility. There are also rumors that she’ll receive a presidential pardon in exchange for pointing the finger at the elites who were part of Epstein’s network—which won’t include Trump for obvious reasons.

Had the well-being of survivors been MAGA’s primary or even just a major concern, there would have been outrage over her lenient treatment. But MAGA influencer Benny Johnson tragi-comically praised the arrangement saying, “this is what transparency looks like,” in an Instagram video captioned, “Ghislaine EXPOSING The Epstein List?!” NewsMax’s Greg Kelly, perversely, suggested that Maxwell might herself be a victim.

Massie tellingly said that he would support a pardon of Maxwell, so long as she “has information that could help us.” Translation: So long as the right elites are fingered, the survivors and victims are expendable.

This isn’t altogether surprising. The MAGA movement doesn’t exactly have a strong record of advocacy for protecting women—minor or adult—from sexual predation. Trump, after all, was elected to the presidency despite the revelations from the Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted about groping young women without consequences. He has faced numerous accusations of sexual harassment and assault. And he was reelected despite a civil court determination that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.

Trump has embraced others accused or found guilty of harassment or sex crimes or of covering them up, appointing several to his Cabinet. In 2017, Trump publicly endorsed Roy Moore, then candidate for the U.S. Senate from Alabama, even when many other Republican leaders had withheld or revoked their endorsement due to credible accounts of Moore’s history of sexual misconduct toward teenage girls. Trump allies were instrumental in the release to the U.S. of “manosphere” misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother, charged in Europe with rape and human trafficking and accused of trafficking minors.

Taking Minor Abuse Seriously

Sexual abuse of minors is a far too prevalent and an exceptionally hideous category of crime. The nonprofit Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) estimates that every nine minutes a child is sexually assaulted. The vulnerability of children makes every case gut-wrenching. Survivors can suffer intensely and interminably, experiencing high levels of various long-term health issues, including PTSD. Because early abuse can lead to self-harm, not every child victim survives to adulthood. Some take their own lives later. Virginia Giuffre, preyed upon as a girl by Epstein and Maxwell, died by suicide this spring after years of fighting for justice. Her posthumous memoir reveals the “terrible wounds” these two criminals—and others associated with them—caused.

Every individual, no matter how rich or politically connected, Republican or Democrat, who participated in Epstein’s racket deserves to be held to account to deliver justice to his victims. But in the hands of Trump and his movement, the case has become a political cudgel to wield against political enemies. Sadly, that makes the most vulnerable mere tools in the hands of motivated adults. That is not the hallmark of a just and decent society.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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