Trump/Epstein

Where we are on it, and what could have been.

Two short comments and then a bit of retroactive speculation about the latest in the Trump/Epstein story.

I’ve been saying here and elsewhere that reaching the magic 218 on the House discharge petition was mainly about internal House politics. Once they hit 218 – which the House did on Wednesday – that would appear to force a House vote, but in fact there appear to be a number of procedural options available to Speaker Mike Johnson to delay any vote for quite some time. Then even if it does get a vote (and win) it’s just an ordinary bill, which means it goes to the Senate, which can just ignore it. Or, if does come to the Senate floor for a vote, it would need to defeat a filibuster, which means 60 votes in a 53-47 Republican-majority chamber.

There’s more. Even if it has 60 votes, Senators could still add a poison pill amendment to it that might kill it in that chamber or back in the House. Or just any amendment at all to it, which would send it back to the House, where the Speaker could then block it from reaching the House floor. And if all that fails, Donald Trump would presumably veto the bill.

Most of that is still true, but the news on Wednesday significantly improved the bill’s prospects. First, Johnson has agreed to schedule a vote next week. And then Politico reported that “dozens” of Republicans might vote for it, “possibly 100 or more.” That’s still not necessarily a veto-proof majority, or convincing evidence that such a bill could reach 60 votes in the Senate, but it certainly puts that possibility on the table. So still many steps to go, but perhaps this bill really might become law.¹

Will all of this hurt Trump’s popularity? Almost certainly not with his strongest supporters. But that’s only some 25% of the population, give or take. But there are two other interesting groups here. One is the 10% or so who voted for Trump, thought he was doing a good job in January, but have since said they disapprove of how he’s handling the job. They may be eager to hear bad things about him in order to justify their new positions.

And then there are the weak Trump supporters - some 10 to 20% of the electorate. They don’t think he’s a great president, but they’re loyal Republicans, or they think he’s good at some things that justify supporting him overall, or something like that. For them, I suspect it will matter if other high-profile Republicans are critical or supportive.²

Moving on, or actually moving back: What follows is entirely speculative, but I’m going to run with it anyway. As a 2016 Republican nomination junkie, I was fascinated to learn that Epstein offered information to the New York Times about Trump in early December, 2015 – in the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses on February 1. For whatever reason, the Times sat on the story.³ At the time, Trump was leading in most polls, with Ted Cruz a solid second. In the event, Marco Rubio surged late and didn’t quite get there; Iowa wound up:

• Cruz 28%

• Trump 24%

• Rubio 23%

Rubio started moving up in New Hampshire anyway, only to collapse after his debate “glitch” and then rally for a poor fifth place finish, just behind Jeb! Bush.⁴ Rubio bounced back to (barely) finish second in South Carolina, just beating Cruz but ten percentage points behind Trump.

We obviously can’t know what happens if a Trump/Epstein story lands in January, but it wouldn’t have taken much for Rubio to pass Trump for second place, and a complete collapse for Trump isn’t out of the question. After all, without that story Trump was dropping already. Moving forward: Maybe Rubio doesn’t have his poor debate at that point; the candidate who sparked his troubles, Chris Christie, might not have even stayed in the race if things looked less unsettled. Similarly, even if Rubio still has the same debate, even a small improvement puts him ahead of Jeb! In New Hampshire, and he was only five percentage points behind John Kasich for second place there. Bush and Kasich combined for 14% in South Carolina, and it’s easy to see the bulk of that going to Rubio if he had beat them in New Hampshire and they exited.

Or maybe Rubio was destined to collapse anyway, but Trump might have been damaged enough in Iowa (from the hypothetical NYT story, and from then finishing a disappointing third or worse) that he would never recover.⁵

The basic story of the 2016 nomination is that Trump didn’t win by very much, and he probably needed a whole lot of things to break the right way for him to win. A big part of that was mainstream GOP party actors consolidating their support for another candidate just a bit too late to do much good – unlike, say, mainstream Democrats agreeing on Joe Biden as the least-bad alternative after the 2020 Nevada caucuses.

We don’t know. It’s possible that Trump really was unstoppable, although I just don’t see it. It’s also possible that the alternatives were so flawed, and the Republican Party so dysfunctional, that no combination of events would have saved them from Trump.

I was very wrong about this nomination at the time, but I’ve also spent a lot of time since working out what happened, and for whatever it’s worth I think it’s unlikely Trump could have survived another major negative story in the lead-up to Iowa.

What I am certain of is that it would be nice for the New York Times to do a full investigation of what happened here. And of course it would be nice if Republicans actually punished Trump for all of this. But I’m not holding my breath for either of these things to happen.

1. Even if it becomes law, the Trump White House and the current Department of Justice aren’t exactly known for following the law without question then they don’t want to. I don’t know what kinds of legal stalling mechanisms are available, but I suspect that the courts could get involved before the administration complies. It’s also worth noting that Trump has been known to obstruct justice even without an underlying crime.

2. This is all about what we learned on Wednesday, not what if anything we might learn going forward. Should it matter? Well, as far as I can see, there was far more than enough about Trump’s history of abuse and harassment that was public knowledge back in 2015 to totally disqualify him from ever serving in political office; unfortunately, many Republicans didn’t see it that way.

3. Why? We don’t know. It’s possible that they investigated it thoroughly and the story just didn’t measure up for some reason. Could Epstein’s offer been phony? Sure. Or perhaps it was just too thin to run with. I think the Times owes us answers, but news outlets get offered stories they ultimately pass on for good reasons all the time. And by the way, I’ve seen several people outraged that the Department of Justice didn’t leak this stuff when Joe Biden was president, but again: It’s not clear yet that there are crimes here beyond the ones that were charged, and we really, really don’t want the FBI and DOJ to release raw information, even if it’s absolutely true and appalling, if it’s not connected to actual crimes.

4. For the young’ns: Bush’s campaign materials in 2016 all used “Jeb!” for the lackluster candidate, and internet tradition requires we all refer to him that way, at least when talking about the 2016 nomination.

5. Who could have emerged from Iowa if Trump really had collapsed? Ben Carson finished fourth and Rand Paul was fifth. Neither of them seems likely to have been helped by a Trump collapse, but who knows? And after all, a real surprise candidate finishing third might have been a big story, and therefore potentially a big bounce, going forward.