After a long wait and quite a few twists and turns, the deadline for the publication of the so-called "Epstein" files - all documents related to the investigation of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein - expired at the end of last week. The US Department of Justice finally published the files in question, but the disappointment was enormous. Because a large part of them turned out to be hidden - entire pages with completely crossed out content under the pretext of confidentiality.
The problems that the Trump administration is facing with Epstein will clearly not be resolved by the publication of these documents and photos. Trump does not seem to appear in them at all, although it is known that the US president and the sex offender were friends for many years and moved in the same environment. The scandal became even bigger when one of the few photos showing Donald Trump disappeared from the special website for the files. After this caused public outrage, the photo mysteriously returned.
Pam Bondi failed, and those close to Trump know it well
In an interview with "Vanity Fair" in recent days, Trump's chief of staff Susie Wiles directly criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi for the way she handled the publication of the "Epstein" files. "First she gave them folders with nothing in them. And then she said that the witness list or the client list was on her desk. There is no client list and it certainly wasn't on her desk," Wiles told the publication.
Despite the gigabytes of information, these releases of Epstein's files are unlikely to end conspiracy theories on the subject, writes the American publication "The Atlantic". Rather, they will have the opposite effect - they will fuel speculation that much is missing or has been hidden. In a press release related to the release of the documents, Pam Bondi wrote that the administration is "fulfilling President Trump's commitment to transparency and exposing the heinous actions of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices." But the extent of the redaction seems to undermine at least part of Bondi's statement. While there are every reason to protect the privacy of Epstein's victims, the faces of many of the witnesses in the photos in the dossier are obscured by large black squares.
Will Epstein alienate some of Trump's voters
Trump has a very big problem with the Epstein conspiracy theories - for how many of his voters this is key. For months, far-right online circles have been seeing criticism from influencers and content creators who were once passionate Trump supporters of the administration's handling of the Epstein case.
Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that analyses online extremism, told the BBC that the debate over the Epstein dossiers is just one of the controversies contributing to the problems facing the MAGA movement. "At the beginning of the year, MAGA was triumphant - it was a threatening cultural force, and now the train is going off the rails and there is no clear sign that it will stabilize or recover in the near future," he says. "It seems that Trump's hard base has atrophied over the course of the year," the researcher believes. However, he says it is too early to say whether the recent release of the heavily redacted documents will have a significant impact on those people, whom Susie Wiles describes in her interview with "Vanity Fair" as "Joe Rogan listeners." "The people who are showing an unusual interest in Epstein are the new members of the Trump movement - the people I think about all the time – "because I want to make sure they're not just Trump voters, they're Republican voters," Wiles told Vanity Fair.
Surveys and experts confirm Trump's chief of staff's concerns about the instability of the movement, the BBC reports. A study published in early December by the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute identified nearly a third of Trump supporters as "new Republicans" - people who voted for the party for the first time in 2024. The study found that just over half of this category said they would "definitely" support a Republican in the 2026 midterm elections. "These voters are attracted to Trump but are not long-term loyal to the Republican Party," the institute concluded.