Why is Trump so desperate to distract the country from the Epstein files?

By Robin Abcarian

Los Angelos Times, November 16, 2025

Watching our national political dumpster fires — the longest government shutdown in history, the nearly eight-week shuttering of the House of Representatives — one really has to wonder: What the hell was that?

The shutdown occurred because Democratic senators withheld their votes on a resolution that would continue to fund the government. Why? They wanted to reverse Medicaid cuts and extend the tax credits that make health insurance possible for millions of low-income Americans. Republicans, who would rather give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, insisted they would deal with the health insurance issue separately, at a later date. (Insert eye roll here.) For 43 painful days, Democrats held firm. And then they caved.

Six Democrats and one Independent joined every Republican in a vote to end the shutdown. I’m hard pressed to see what Americans got in return.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a bizarre effort to prevent a vote on the measure that could lead to the government’s release of the Epstein files, sent his colleagues home for two months, and refused to swear in a newly elected Democratic representative, all to forestall such a vote. And then he caved.

Johnson finally swore in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, whereupon she immediately became the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition that will force the House to vote on whether to release the Justice Department’s files on the country’s most notorious sex trafficker. The bill is expected to pass and will probably then die in the Senate or on President Trump’s desk.

So, what, exactly, was the point of shuttering the House?

Was Johnson trying to protect Trump from “incriminating” information in the Epstein files?

Or simply currying favor with an increasingly erratic president by doing his bidding?

Trying to protect Trump from the stench of Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell in 2019, makes as much sense as believing that Republicans will offer a good faith solution to skyrocketing health insurance premiums. The GOP has utterly failed for 15 years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. With that kind of track record, they simply cannot be trusted to address health insurance in any meaningful way. And Trump cannot be protected from Epstein because we already know so much about their relationship. Epstein did, after all, describe himself on tape as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

Trump can call the Epstein scandal a “hoax” all he wants now. But while campaigning in 2024, Trump said he would release the files, pleasing his conspiracy-minded MAGA supporters.

“It’s not that they care about Epstein personally,” explained Jack Posobiec, the right-wing agitator who promoted a conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton-led child sex ring in the nonexistent basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor that led to an actual shooting in 2016. “It’s that they care that there’s this optic that Epstein was somehow involved with a shadowy system that actually has control over our government, control over our institutions, control of our lives, and really is a ruling power over us.”

Posobiec was half right.

The “shadowy system” turns out to be the elite and billionaire class that flies on private jets to private islands, abuses underage girls, and gets away with it. The high-ranking officials, techies, scientists, academics and other men who availed themselves of Epstein’s revolving door of sexual gratification never thought they’d be caught. And so far, with the glaring exception of one member of the British royal family, none of the accused has paid a price.

In death, the sleazy Epstein left many receipts, now coming to light with this week’s release of 23,000 pages of documents, obtained by the House from his estate.

Epstein mused with the journalist and Trump nemesis Michael Wolff about how he could damage the president’s political career. “I am the one able to take him down,” Epstein wrote to a friend in 2018. And while he coached former Harvard President Larry Summers on how to approach a woman he was pursuing in 2017, Epstein told Summers, “I have met some very bad people ,, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.. so yes- dangerous.”

Certainly, Trump is a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser who has boasted of grabbing women’s genitals and falsified business records to pay hush money to a porn star with whom he was accused of having sex while his wife was home with a newborn. But the Epstein emails don’t implicate him in the criminal sexual abuse of minors.

And yes, Epstein had a low opinion of his onetime pal, comparing Trump in emails to a mafia don, and variously referring to him as “dirty,” “F—ing crazy,” “borderline insane” and “dangerous.”

But while Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls,” he also wrote that Trump “never got a massage.”

Why, then, is Trump so desperate to change the subject from Epstein?

Maybe the simplest explanation is the best.

As the political commentator Bakari Sellers put it the other day on CNN, “Everybody knows that Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody tried to hide that, and so you have to wear around your neck that you were friends with one of the most notorious pedophiles in the history of the country.”

Source: Column: Why is Trump so desperate to distract the country from the Epstein files? - Los Angeles Times