Why Is Epstein the Deal-Breaker for Some of Trump's Base? We Have a Theory.

As the Surge was going to print last weekend, the Trump administration was starting to take some heat from its MAGA base for declaring that it will not be releasing any more of the material generated by investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker and rapist who many believe was the victim of a staged jailhouse “suicide” six years ago, and whose relationships with other elite figures might be further detailed in unreleased files. And boy, are they still taking heat!

MAGA has long wanted the “Epstein client list” revealed because of the QAnon-related conspiracy theory that it will implicate a network of Democratic pedophiles who had Epstein killed to keep him quiet, and Trump ran in 2024 on a promise to reveal everything possible. In early July, though, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, wrote in a memo that Epstein's death was definitely a suicide and there is nothing of any interest to the public in the case files; Trump himself has since started calling Epstein's case a hoax . Unlike every other time the president has performed a sudden Orwellian reversal on an issue, though, the base has not entirely come with him on this one. (The Times has a nice chart showing which far-right figures are still not happy. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told one of them , podcaster Benny Johnson—no relation—that “we should put everything out there.”)

That might have something to do with the fact that Trump socialized with Epstein and has been accused of numerous sexual assaults himself, or it could be about cognitive dissonance: If Epstein is “a hoax” that everyone needs to let go now that it's served its purpose of getting Trump elected, that might imply that the entire QAnon universe of theories was also a bunch of below-average fan faction that Trump encouraged because it got his dumb voters riled up. (We're still working on finding the German word for "coming around to admitting an uncomfortable truth in order to maintain a much larger set of beliefs about things that are definitely still not true.") In any case, this was all starting to make non-MAGA observers wonder if the president has something to hide, even before the publication of a bombshell late-Thursday Wall Street Journal article which reported that Trump appears to have written Epstein a 50 ^th -birthday card featuring a drawing of a naked woman and a poem that includes the phrases “We have certain things in common” and “may every day be another wonderful secret.” (Trump denied having made the card, telling the Journal, “I never wrote a picture in my life,” which does not appear to be accurate .)

Democrats are famous for being unable to decide whether something that Trump has done is a world-historical scandal or a distraction from the kitchen-table issues that real Americans care about until they've done weeks of focus-grouping on it. But there are some exceptions to this rule, and one of them is, currently, going real nuts on the Epstein stuff . That would be Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Dem on the Senate Finance Committee, who has helpfully prodded the news cycle along by suggesting that, although he can't say much more about it because of confidentiality laws, there might be some interesting information contained in the suspicious-activity reports about certain Epstein transactions that his banks filed to the feds. Like, maybe, Epstein lending Donald Trump money , given that they were demonstrably friends with each other at times that Trump demonstrably needed money ? Who can say? Certainly not Ron Wyden. But he's one of many reasons, in addition to the aforementioned birthday card, why this is not going away. A second is that the Department of Justice just happens to have fired one of the prosecutors who worked on Epstein's case . A third is that security video that the Department of Justice recently released, purporting to show that there was no activity outside Epstein's jail cell before he died, appears to have been edited and doesn't actually show his cell door .

Perhaps no member of Congress better represents the branch's relationship with the Trump 2.0 White House than Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. The Southern gentleman likes to let people know that he thinks Donald Trump has poor judgment , and has already announced that he won't be running for reelection because Washington has gotten too partisan . He also almost never denies Trump a vote that's needed to advance one of his bills or nominees on a party-line basis. It's a fascinating—even artistic— duality that was once again on display this week. First, Tillis voted to cancel trillions of dollars in previously appropriated funds for public broadcasting but told reporters that he would very strongly consider changing his stance, and refuse to vote for more spending cuts, if he found out that the White House didn't carry out the first round of cuts in the way that's been agreed to. ( This was likely their reaction.) Then, on the heels of having given a big self-flagellatory interview about how much he regrets his vote to confirm MAGA stooge Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, Tillis voted to advance the appointment of MAGA Department of Justice stooge Emil Bove—who faces a quite credible accusation of having recently committed a federal crime by disobeying direct court orders—to the federal judiciary. If only there was someone (else) out there who could do something about all these bad ideas coming out of the White House! (Also looking for that person: Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who just introduced legislation that would roll back some of the Medicaid cuts that were included in the budget reconciliation bill he voted to pass two weeks ago .)

Sure, we like to get our licks in on the Democratic Party for tying itself in message-tested knots on issues like immigration rather than simply deciding on a set of guiding principles and sticking to them. And there's a strong argument to be made—a decisive one, really—that the group which bears most responsibility for the Republican Party's immigration policies is the Republican Party. Yet some blame here must also be brought to the United States electorate, which swept Republicans back into power in 2024 after a campaign in which GOP figures with ties to the white supremacist movement promised explicitly and repeatedly to carry out a mass campaign of deportation against every noncitizen in the country, including those who are gainfully contributing to society, have lived in the US for years, and do not have criminal records. Now that this is actually happening to sympathetic individuals in their own communities , though, the public is against it: According to a new Gallup poll , only 38 percent of Americans now support deporting “all undocumented immigrants,” while support for providing individuals with a legal “pathway to citizenship” has risen to 78 percent. Sixty-two percent of respondents say they disapprove of Trump's handling of immigration, against only 35 percent who support it. OK, we'll start over again in 2028, we guess!

During Kamala Harris' brief search for a running mate last summer, one Democratic figure pegged by keen observers as a potential rising star in the party was Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. The most exciting fact about Beshear from Dems' perspective is that he's managed to remain popular in a deep-red state without compromising what are, in context, quite liberal positions on trans rights, unions, and abortion. ( How to do that is the million-dollar question, but the gist seems to be that he's a trusted administrator and economic cheerleader who comes across as “authentic” … and that Republicans have so much power in the Kentucky Legislature that he couldn't damage his brand by getting in the way of locally popular right-wing policies even if he tried.) This week Beshear took his show on the road to the early primary state of South Carolina , introducing himself at several events as, in Semafor's words, “the normal Democrat”—one who talks like a regular person rather than a left-wing academic snob but will still outright defend the concept of diversity rather than hemming and hawing and hosting right-wing nationalists on a podcast . The early reviews for this approach were good . Pencil this guy into the Oval Office! (Just kidding, the haters and jackals of the elitist press—including and especially the Surge—will come up with a reason to be sick of him by mid–next year at the latest.)

Sometimes a headline can make your day, and this week Reuters delivered an all-timer in the form of “ Pompeii Welcomes Home Erotic Mosaic Looted by Nazi Officer .” Preserved by volcanic ash, the mosaic in question depicts “a man reclining in bed with his female partner standing in front of him,” a situation apparently so alluring that an unnamed German serving in Italy during WWII could not help but thieve it for the Fatherland. (You can see the mosaic here —it shows her whole butt, yowza!) And now, thanks to diplomacy, it is being returned to its rightful owners: the perennially oiled-up, olive-skinned men and women of Italia . “Every looted artifact that returns is a wound that heals,” said the director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “Hubba-hubba!” (He didn't say the second part. As far as we know.)