Despite Trump being in a position to potentially release these documents, he has attempted to downplay the entire situation from various angles, only inflaming matters further with each attempt. He brushed it off in a Cabinet meeting, asked for its significance to be minimized on Truth Social, and expressed irritation when questioned about it by a reporter.

The MAGA-influencer complex shows no sign of abandoning the Epstein topic, nor do their audiences appear ready to move on. Recently, the influencer community, along with the GOP, has adapted Trump’s narrative into a more palatable talking point. This shift follows a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Trump was told by the Justice Department that his name appeared in documents concerning Epstein. Alex Jones, the Infowars host who fervently discussed the Epstein Files, highlighted Epstein’s past membership at Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s subsequent expulsion of him over a decade ago. The narrative allows for defending Trump more vigorously once mainstream media implicated him in negative conduct.

Laura Loomer, another prominent influencer who’d been criticizing the administration for its underwhelming response, also took the opportunity to try coming home by questioning where exactly Trump’s name appeared in the files, while also glazing Trump. “Are they trying to say that a file is somebody’s name in an address book?” she rhetorically asked Politico Playbook on Thursday, adding that she, too, had a large address book. “Some of those people in my address book have committed crimes. Does that mean I’m implicated in their crimes? President Trump is not a pedophile. And I look forward to seeing him sue every journalist and publication that is trying to imply that he is one.”

In the days and weeks since the Trump administration released their brief memo about the Epstein files, the MAGA influencer world — specifically, those who built their careers “just asking questions” about Epstein while also cozying up to Trump — has grappled with a difficult choice: either cater to their audience’s demand to keep asking what the elites are hiding about Epstein, or maintain their relationship and standing with the White House.

Some have chosen their audiences, gambling that their following is loyal beyond Trump, and that their influence isn’t contingent on their White House access. (Tucker Carlson, for instance, published a two-hour episode that was entirely focused on the Epstein conspiracies — one week after he implied that Epstein was a Mossad agent.) Others have completely flipped back to Trump, such as the influencer Catturd, an onetime Epstein truther who began implying that “the podcast bro ‘influencers’” now criticizing Trump may have taken Russian money to do so. (In 2024, US prosecutors indicted two employees of RT for illegally funneling money to spread Kremlin propaganda, alleging that they had put $10 million into a Tennessee-based media company whose description matched up with Tenet Media, which worked with Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and others.) Catturd then tweeted that he was “never abandoning Trump”, and spent the subsequent week calling for Barack Obama’s indictment and posting memes of press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

But for everyone else, it’s been difficult to have it both ways. Loomer’s attempt to pin the blame on Attorney General Pam Bondi, for instance, failed when Trump refused to fire Bondi, while influencers who attempted to convince their audience to move onto different topics saw their audience revolt (particularly if those influencers, such as Benny Johnson, cited their conversations with government officials as reason enough).

And before you dismiss it as sturm-and-drang on the internet, the very same dynamic can be seen in Congress, where the Republicans are trying their best to satisfy the base while appeasing the President — a task made difficult because their normal, everyday constituents also hold deep suspicions about the entire Epstein matter. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found that the vast majority of voters — including a majority of Republicans — believe that the government is hiding information about the infamous “client list”. And tellingly, only 35 percent of Republicans believed that the Trump administration was handling it well. (30 percent said Trump was not, and 35 percent were unsure.)

On Wednesday, a House Oversight subcommittee voted to subpoena the Department of Justice for the Epstein Files, with a majority composed of five Democrats and three Republicans. The two Republicans who opposed the subpoena ended up tacking on other requests for Epstein-related communications from Biden officials and the DOJ. Per ABC News, the “officials” included the Democratic subjects of MAGA’s most enduring conspiracy theories: “Bill and Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, William Barr, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales.”

In other words, no one seems to be able to run with Trump’s assessment that Epstein is “somebody that nobody cares about.” Unable to quell the belief that there’s a conspiracy afoot, the only thing to do is try to implicate Democrats. Even Speaker Mike Johnson, who abruptly called a five-week recess last Thursday to prevent his Democratic counterparts from voting to release the Epstein files, leaned in on a potential conspiracy. “One of our concerns is, of course, that it was held in the hands of the DOJ leaders under the last administration, the Biden-Harris administration,” he told a Newsmax reporter on Wednesday. “And we all know how crooked and corrupt so many of those officials were, how they engaged in lawfare against President Trump. He has a concern, and I do as well, that things could have been doctored in those records.” When it comes to right-wing talking points based on sordid, unproven allegations, it’s best to start winking early — and in sync with the president, too.