Is Epstein the new Russiagate?

Political types are obsessed with the story. But that doesn't mean it's penetrated into the broader public.

A review of this newsletter’s search function will reveal that I’ve never before written the words “Jeffrey Epstein” in a Silver Bulletin post. In fact, I’ve referenced Epstein’s surname just once in passing, quoting from an Elon Musk tweet that claimed President Trump “is in the Epstein files” — a conclusion that’s now reportedly been shared with Trump.

Part of that is about the sort of newsletter I’m trying to run here. There are only three of us; we cover a lot of things that aren’t politics, and so we focus on stories that are either a little neglected or where we think we have some unique perspective to add. The other part of it is that, believe it or not, I’m not really a political junkie.

Pretty much the only time I watch cable news is when it’s on at the gym or the airport. I have a fair number of friends who work in media, but almost none are involved in politics as such. The one advantage this provides me with is that I’m sometimes able to avoid what I consider to be the biggest bias of all in political reporting, which is the tendency to vastly overrate how much people are following political news from day to day, which can make it hard to predict which stories permeate into the broader public.

The media is more interested than the public in Epstein

On July 7, the Justice Department claimed that Epstein did not have a “client list” and said it didn’t expect to release any more files about his case to the public, contradicting implied promises by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump himself to provide more disclosure. In the three weeks since then, this has been overwhelmingly the lead political story, often framed around headlines like these. It’s a “nightmare” for Trump that’s hit “escape velocity” or could even lead to a “death spiral.” At the very least, it’s overshadowing the rest of his agenda.

There’s some literal truth in the latter claim: House Speaker Mike Johnson shut down his chamber early to avoid votes on releasing further Epstein materials. And it doesn’t take a degree in Bayesian reasoning to recognize that, however bad stonewalling on Epstein might look for Trump, whatever’s in the files is probably worse.

It’s not just the liberal media making these assertions, either: people on the conspiracy-minded right like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn have speculated about the political fallout, too.

I can’t really blame anyone for being obsessed with the story. Almost everything about Epstein, from the circumstances of his death to his alleged ties to intelligence agencies, raises as many questions as answers. There’s been a lot of serious reporting on the topic that goes beyond memes like “Epstein didn’t kill himself”.

But in many respects, the story is also tailor-made for gossipy cable news coverage. It’s episodic, in the way that sports coverage or major jury trials often are. There’s both the crime and the cover-up. You can approach it from a lot of angles — there’s an entangled web of names and claims and counterclaims.¹ But there’s also enough breathing space — Epstein died almost six years ago — to provide plenty of time for punditry and speculation.

The feeding frenzy around Epstein has caused some political junkies to forget that Trump is often impervious to consequences: that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t really cost him among his base. And although even Bannon has questioned that assumption in this case, so far the evidence that the broader public is greatly concerned about the details of Epstein is pretty thin.

Google search traffic in the United States reveals that the peak of interest in the Epstein case a couple of weeks ago was only about one-third as high as the one surrounding tariffs in April. I know that might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison, but tariffs are an interesting benchmark precisely because they’re one of the few things that did produce notable political fallout for Trump.

Trump’s approval hasn’t fallen among Republicans

But isn’t Trump’s approval rating plummeting again? You can find plenty of headlines to that effect. But the overall impact is pretty modest in our tracking. On July 7, Trump’s net approval rating was a −6.7, now, it’s −8.4. I don’t need to remind readers how easy it is to cherry-pick polling data to create a narrative that Trump is perpetually in a worsening crisis.

Despite all that, I don’t necessarily take for granted that Trump’s floor is as high as it was in his first term. He’s now a lame duck, and second-term approval ratings are generally lower. But almost by definition, this would require some erosion from his base — and so far, we aren’t really seeing that.

I asked Eli to pull data on partisan splits in approval ratings, comparing the most recent poll from each firm² 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.

What about independents? Maybe that’s where you’d expect to see more impact; they’re less loyal to Trump and some independents are the types who distrust the establishment. But there’s very little happening there, either. Trump’s approval rating among independents is unchanged at 34 percent — not good, but it hasn’t gotten any worse — while his disapproval has ticked up just one point, from 59 to 60.

I won’t show you the data for Democrats because it’s exactly what you’d expect: his approval rating is unchanged at 8 percent, while his disapproval rose just slightly from 88 to 89.

Sure, you can squint at these numbers and tell yourself there will be a happy ending for Democrats. Party identification isn’t static; in theory, a voter could be so frustrated by Trump’s handling of Epstein that they’ve not only disavowed Trump, but the entire Republican Party. And maybe we’re just at the beginnings of Epsteingate. In the tables, polls are listed from top to bottom from most to least recent, and some fresh polls like YouGov show more of a decline than the consensus does. If MAGA voters are discouraged, that might show up in lower turnout in next year’s midterms but not in polls of all adults or registered voters.

But also, 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.

More news coverage of Epstein might not hurt Trump

On the left, there’s been a pervasive tendency — I call it “The Big Cope” — to attribute whatever problems Democrats are having to media coverage. The nature of the complaints constantly shifts. The media is alleged to cover some stories, like Biden’s age, too much, others (like “democracy”) too little, and still others in the wrong way, like by focusing on political rather than policy implications.

I haven’t seen those complaints about media coverage of Epstein; instead the refrain is that anything other than Epstein is distraction that Trump coverts. Rather, it’s an interesting test case precisely because there has been the wall-to-wall coverage of a negative story for Trump that liberals often clamor for. And yet, it’s hard to discern any major impact on his approval numbers.

Maybe that’s because, as 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?

There’s also something about the “strange new respect” for taking the Epstein story seriously in high-prestige, center-left outlets like the New York Times that I find a little off-putting. As of mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the Times had run 178 stories that mention Epstein so far in July, up from a long-term baseline of around ten stray mentions a month:

I don’t deny that the story is newsworthy — though maybe not 6-stories-every-day-newsworthy — but now that it’s Trump caught up in the crosshairs instead of people with a more liberal valence, it’s gained more respectability even though not all that much new has been revealed about it. And the partisan polarization around Epstein is shifting, too. Shortly after his death in 2019, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that Epstein had been murdered in prison rather than killing himself. Now, that’s evened out: in an Emerson poll last week, 41 percent of Democrats say Epstein was murdered as compared to 40 percent of Republicans. (So did 38 percent of respondents with postgraduate degrees, typically the group that consumes the most political news.)

Normie voters aren’t running tallies of New York Times stories. But they may nevertheless detect that this is now a story that liberal news junkies — not conservatives or their conspiracy-minded uncles — are interested in bringing up at every opportunity. Since these types of voters don’t trust the media, their priors might shift toward thinking that there isn’t much there.

Personally, I’ve found myself oscillating between finding the underlying details of the case fascinating — maybe respectable college-educated, center-left types like me should have been paying more attention to Epstein all along — and a second instinct. In the way the Epstein story has hijacked the news cycle, and with the constant predictions of spiraling damage to Trump’s political standing, it reminds me of another story that lent itself to episodic coverage: Russiagate.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which every minor Russia-related revelation in the story made news in 2017 and 2018, completely taking over the Rachel Maddow Show, for instance, from its formerly more policy-wonkish past.³ Liberals were literally selling prayer candles labeled “pee tape” showing Robert Mueller as a saint-like figure, convinced that the walls were caving in around Trump. Facebook ads from Russian bot farms that made up an infinitesimal fraction of the content voters were consuming in 2016 were blown up into a huge scandal.

I’ll assert that Russiagate didn’t end well for Democrats, but I’ll admit that’s hard to prove. Trump’s approval rating did decline significantly in 2017 — more steeply than so far in his second term — and Democrats did have a pretty good 2018 midterm. What I think is clearer is that the obsessive coverage of the case probably insulated Trump from more serious scandals that came along later.

We’ll keep an eye on Epsteingate at Silver Bulletin. It may well be early days — whatever political consequences there are for Trump will flow from further substantive revelations and not breathless headlines.

Still, I suppose I’m glad I didn’t write about the story sooner. A week ago, Trump’s net approval rating had fallen to -10.3 in our tracking, and at looked like predictions about a death spiral had a possibility of coming true. Since then, Trump’s numbers have rebounded, and it looks like we’re back to the usual pattern: the overwhelming majority of voters either already hate Trump, or are happy to shrug off his scandals.

1. At Polymarket, you can even bet on which names will later be leaked.)

2. Or at least, each firm that makes these partisan crosstabs available; a handful of them don’t.

3. To be fair, we had plenty of “emergency podcasts” on Russiagate developments at FiveThirtyEight too.