Does MAGA have a future that isn’t controlled by Donald Trump?
If this week was any indication, the answer is “yes”. And Trump himself risks the possibility of those voters moving on.
Since practically the first day he took office in 2017, Donald Trump owned the Republican Party. There was little room for dissent against a man who’d won office on the premise that he was the lone Republican who meant what he said and who promised to shake up a political establishment which, in his depictions, was hopelessly corrupt and on top of that: deeply, profoundly inept.
But the times, they are a changin’.
As Capitol Hill prepared to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history this week, the House Oversight Committee was quietly building a bomb. On Wednesday, as Donald Trump eagerly awaited the end of a minor political saga he’d blamed for his party’s crushing defeat in off-year elections, that bomb detonated.
“I know how dirty donald is,” wrote Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and sex trafficker of underaged girls, in an email released by the committee. In others: “i want you to realise that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump...[VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him...he has never once been mentioned.”
“[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine [sic] to stop.”
Membership of the House Oversight Committee includes both Republicans and Democrats. It’s chaired by James Comer, the blustery Republican congressman who led the GOP’s ill-fated efforts to impeach former President Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, the same day Trump and his Republican allies were to celebrate the collapse of Democratic resistance in the Senate over the shutdown, that committee released 20,000 pages of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate. The batch included personal emails sent and received by Epstein in the years before and after his 2008 conviction for soliciting an underage girl as a prostitute.
And the White House treated it like a bomb had hit the building. Trump summoned his advisers to the Situation Room, where his predecessor watched the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, to discuss how to respond to the fallout.
There’s a short list of Republicans in the House who’ve publicly defied the president by signing on to a Democratic discharge petition to release the full breadth of the Epstein files, following the DOJ and FBI’s announcement that the agencies would not do so: Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace.
Apart from Massie, the remaining three have embraced loyalty to the MAGA brand as their raison d'etre for public service, and have all sought Trump’s endorsement in their various campaigns for office.
But there appears to be a much longer list of Republicans who are willing to tactfully use this issue to shore up their own credibility with MAGA Republicans, possibly at the president’s expense.
Comer and the House Oversight Committee are the clearest examples. But there’s more: Speaker Mike Johnson, who owes his job as GOP leader to the president and his ability to be Trump’s mouthpiece in the lower chamber, says he’s not willing to give the administration any more cover after keeping the House out of session during the shutdown, delaying a vote on the bipartisan Epstein discharge petition for weeks.
In short, the Republican House caucus has largely made up its mind. Most assume that they can’t afford to appear uninterested on this topic, or dismiss it as a Democratic hoax (as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and her boss have both done).
“House Republicans are eager to put the Epstein controversy in the rear-view mirror,” Politico reported this week.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the speaker praised Comer’s efforts at Oversight to pursue releases of documents from the investigation, while giving no mention to the White Houes and DOJ’s efforts to keep further information from coming out.
“That’s been a treasure trove,” Johnson said of the documents from Epstein’s estate — a batch which included the first direct implication, from Epstein, that Trump had knowledge of his illicit affiars.
“So that’s going to continue,” the Speaker said of his caucus’s efforts to push for more releases. “The subpoenas are being ... complied with, and more are on the way.”
Meanwhile, the rebel GOP representatives signed on to the discharge petition tread a fine line: avoiding outright disloyalty to Trump, but making it clear at the same time that the president’s pressure on the House GOP was irrelevant.
“It's unfortunate that not more Republicans were actually on the initial discharge. But I know in talking to many of them, that many of them are going to vote yes [to release the files],” one of those Republicans, Rep. Nancy Mace, told The Independent.
Reports indicate that Trump reached out to both Mace and Boebert before the vote this week. He failed to sway either one, though Mace insisted that the president wasn’t reaching out to them to intimidate them.
“No one has threatened me,” she told The Independent. “The president hasn't threatened me, and the President didn't ask me get off the discharge petition.”
So where does that leave Trump?
Largely speaking, the Epstein issue is unique in its salience with such a massive swath of the American public — that’s where these lawmakers are finding the strength to buck the party.
But the story clearly threatens to sap any remaining political capital Trump has on the Hill, at least until the 2026 midterms. Will further releases detract from that strength even further?
Either way, this is happening at the worst possible time for Trump: before the end of the first year of his four-year term, right as Republican members of Congress are looking at their potential re-election fights, and gauging how to protect their seats after a brutal Democratic sweep of 2025’s off-year statewide elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New York.
At the same time, the White House is battling perceptions from voters who accuse them of not making inflation and cost-of-living expenses a higher priority while the president galavants around the world in a bid to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize.
If he’s unlucky, this could be the defining issue of his second term — a term which isn’t even one-quarter completed.
