There’s a sickening sense of recognition attending the release from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee of a new cache of e-mails from Jeffrey Epstein and his associates indicating that Donald Trump had full knowledge of the pedophile sex trafficker’s activities—and indeed “spent hours ”at Epstein’s house with one of Epstein’s victims, as one of the e-mails from 2011 says. This is, after all, the same Donald Trump who had been close friends with Epstein for more than a decade prior to the still-unexplained falling out between the two in the mid-aughts. It’s the same Trump who creepily lurked in the dressing room of the Miss Teen USA pageant he sponsored, and who still more creepily touted his own young daughter’s erotic appeal in media interviews. And it’s the same Trump who bragged in the infamous Access Hollywood tapes that his celebrity conferred upon him the right to approach women and “grab them by the pussy”—and who reportedly laughed when Gary Busey was accused of the same conduct on the set of his reality-TV show The Apprentice. It’s the same Trump who was found liable for sexual assault in E. Jean Carroll’s $40 million civil suit alleging he attacked her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, and was found liable for engineering campaign payoffs to his former mistress Stormy Daniels.

Still, Trump’s Epstein escapades stand out, both because of the sheer depravity that characterized Epstein and his trafficking ring and because the specter of rampant child sexual predation has been a centerpiece of MAGA-fueled conspiracy theorizing, thanks largely to the prominence of QAnon activists in the Trump coalition. The prospect that Congress would release damning Epstein documents has been a key concern for Republicans since the start of Trump’s second term—thanks in no small part to the president’s own promise during the 2024 campaign to sign off on the opening of the Epstein files.

Having weathered the steady torrent of revelations about his own predatory sexual past, Trump no doubt calculated that he once again could direct his followers away from any damaging disclosures in the files, waving them away as just another Democratic-engineered “hoax” seeking to undermine his grip on power. But the narrative around the push for the files’ release didn’t bend to Trump’s usual strategy of denial and conspiracy-mongering.

As pressure built to secure the release of the files, Trump wanly told his followers to move on; meanwhile, Epstein’s former paramour and convicted coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell appeared to be selectively leaking damaging information about the Trump-Epstein alliance, including the president’s winking contribution to the sex trafficker’s 50th-birthday book of testimonials from powerful friends and fellow predators. Even some Republican House members dug in on their demands for the release of the files—and that prospect prompted MAGA-quisling Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the House closed over the past month and half, since its reopening would entail the swearing in of newly elected Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva, who represents the decisive 218th vote in a resolution to release the files. (The House is now scheduled to reopen today to vote on the Senate’s bill to reopen the government, and Johnson will finally have to permit Grijalva to be sworn in.)

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The e-mails released by Democratic Oversight members underline the desperate political rationale behind Johnson’s stonewalling efforts. When Epstein was first facing a federal investigation, he wrote to Maxwell in 2011, “i want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [REDACTED VICTIM’S NAME] spent hours at my house with him,, he’s never once been mentioned.” Maxwell’s terse reply also speaks volumes: “i have been thinking about that.”

After Trump announced his campaign in 2015, the journalist Michael Wolff, who had compiled hundreds of hours of interviews with Epstein, wrote to him to alert that CNN was planning to question Trump about his ties to Epstein; Epstein asked Wolff how he’d go about crafting a statement on Epstein’s behalf in the wake of such an exchange. Wolff’s response again suggests that the sex trafficker possessed a wealth of damning information:

I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane [Epstein’s private aircraft ferrying underage girls to his island, dubbed the Lolita Express] or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he could say Jeffrey Epstein is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.

There’s no indication that CNN posed the Epstein question to Trump back then—yet, six years after Epstein apparently killed himself in a New York jail cell, the currency he might have possessed over Trump now seems like an inescapable toxic liability to a president who has survived no end of past sexual scandals. Just before these latest e-mails surfaced, Ghislaine Maxwell was reportedly petitioning Trump for a commutation of her 20-year prison sentence; Epstein’s former trafficking partner has also been receiving special treatment behind bars, according to a whistleblower cited by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. Maxwell’s earlier leaks seem aimed at a commutation deal, and it must seem to her that such a cozy arrangement should be no great stretch, given that Trump has pardoned many of the ringleaders in the election-denying agitprop campaign that led to the failed coup of January 6. Yet there’s no maneuvering room here for Trump to engineer one of his trademark Mob-style pardon deals; Epstein has improbably become this administration’s greatest threat. In the court of public opinion, Epstein’s epitaph may be that he hanged both himself and Donald Trump.