Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it has often seemed that he transformed a platform that favored progressives into one that bolstered the right instead.

And in the years after that purchase, the right’s political fortunes improved dramatically. The woke era came to a close, conservatives gained the upper hand in the culture war, and President Donald Trump returned to power while Democrats and leftists became disillusioned and dispirited. A mood of right-wing triumph pervaded the platform Musk renamed X.

But in recent months, X has lost its ability to unite the right. Instead, it’s increasingly the place where Trump supporters turn on each other.

Intense and bitter public feuds have broken out over such topics as Israel, antisemitism, bigotry against Indian Americans, and whether people whose ancestors came to the US more recently should be considered less authentically American. Conspiracy theories are running rampant, with many targeting the Trump administration itself.

Importantly, much of this is happening because of X. That is: the changes to the platform’s policies and culture that have been made under Musk’s ownership have altered the norms of what it’s acceptable for right-wingers to say, and have incentivized a race to the bottom for engagement. It turns out that once guardrails against bigotry and misinformation are removed, there’s a huge audience-side “demand” on the right for both. 

“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”

Meanwhile, as X grows more extreme and disconnected from reality, top Trump officials remain obsessed with pandering to its user base — focused on throwing red meat to the online right, rather than trying to win back the ordinary voters who have soured on the president.

In all this lies the seeds for the potential destruction of the MAGA 2.0 coalition. Controversies over antisemitism are shaking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Overt bigotry and an obsession with online nonsense seem ill-suited to retaining the loyalty of the voters of color who backed Trump for the first time in 2024.

And in a way, this is a familiar story. Just a few years ago, when progressives were the most influential Twitter users, it was Democrats who often mistook retweets for reality and got out of touch with ordinary voters. Now it’s the right’s turn in the barrel.

Why Twitter/X is so important and powerful

Twitter was, and X remains, the closest thing we have to a “public square” where people of varying ideological persuasions from different walks of life come together and say what’s on their minds. 

Many of our country’s elites are still on the platform, which helps shape their views of what ideas are in vogue and correct — and how to make sense of the world. Amid an increasingly atomized media and content environment, it’s still the place where various writers and streamers and podcasters come together and talk directly to each other, rather than just to their own audiences.

Crucial to the platform’s power is the pile-on, in which large numbers of users come together to say that someone or something is bad. The pile-on is enjoyable to its participants, who derive meaning and belonging from coming together against a common enemy. Potential targets of the pile-on — corporations, media figures, politicians, other institutions — fear it, and shape their behavior to try to avoid it.

Yet the platform is also, in a sense, a trap. The saying goes that “Twitter isn’t real life” — though that sentiment has seemed somewhat quaint as real life and Twitter have come to resemble one another. But there remains a core truth to it: the platform’s heaviest users tend to be deeply politically engaged and ideological, while the many Americans who follow politics less closely or have more mainstream views are far less represented and vocal. 

The problem is that political actors and coalition participants seeking to gauge what people think of something use X and other feedback mechanisms that are dominated by the most super-engaged slice of their base. For many, the day-to-day work of their job essentially becomes pandering to their super-engaged supporters. (After all, if they’re mad at you, they’re surely going to let you know it, and you’ll likely try to make the problem go away.)

How Musk changed Twitter

Twitter was crucial in driving and amplifying the emboldened social justice activism of the 2010s and early 2020s. Musk then bought it to try and combat that activism, and he changed how the platform worked in a few important ways:

• He rolled back content moderation policies against hate speech and misinformation, restoring many previously banned accounts (such as that of the antisemite Nick Fuentes)
• He started letting anyone buy the “blue check” verified status previously given to journalists and other prominent figures
• He used creator payouts to incentivize people to create viral content

Finally and crucially, Musk also sparked an exodus. Many of the vocal progressives who had long set Twitter’s dominant tone and culture quit using the platform in protest of his behavior. 

The combination of these changes transformed X from a platform where right-wingers talked alongside progressives to a platform where the relatively more “reasonable” right-wingers talked alongside kooks and virulent bigots. 

On Twitter, if you said something too bigoted, you could be banned. On X, that won’t happen — and indeed, creator payouts may give you an incentive to say even more bigoted things, if an audience likes it. 

Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox and moved his show to X, and has since hosted increasingly extreme characters, culminating in his interview of Fuentes this fall, an interview that kick-started a controversy that eventually led to many resignations from the most important conservative think tank, the Project 2025-authoring Heritage Foundation.

All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”

Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk. 

Lately, Rufo has pointed the finger at X’s algorithm as a main culprit, complaining that “Musk’s decision to pay content creators has further detached reach from quality” and urged him to make changes on the platform. 

Longtime conservative blogger Razib Khan expressed similar concerns, recently writing that he’s “starting to worry reading X and seeing the impact of youtube influencers that we’re going to lose because our arguments are starting to sound very stupid.” This shift, he added, represents “a major decrease in IQ.”

The Trump administration’s X obsession – and the attempt to reunite the online right

X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that.

Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers.

The examples are legion. The continuing saga over the “Epstein files” began as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched attempt to pander to right-wing influencers. Top FBI officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are chronically online and obsessed with criticism from right-wing influencers over their supposed failures to reveal deep-state conspiracies. FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel were made as tough talk to impress a right-wing streamer. And Vice President JD Vance is the most online of all, driven to defend the honor of racist shitposters so long as they’re on his side.

This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are.

Rabbit holes, conspiracy theories, and bigotry are spreading on X with no end in sight, and alienating the less extreme people who are exposed to it. But right-wingers’ hope is that they can restore their frayed unity by redirecting their energy to targets they can all agree on.

And they’ve had some success on that in recent days, in right-wing outrage about fraud allegedly committed by Somali immigrants against Minnesota’s welfare programs. It was in fact Rufo who helped focus the right’s attention on this long-public scandal, and a young conservative YouTube influencer who helped it go mega-viral in recent days. 

On this topic, they could all agree on who the bad guys were: African immigrants, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, and the media. It was like old times. Can it last?

Is CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss censoring critical coverage of the Trump administration to please the network’s billionaire backers and the president himself?

It’s the crisis many have anticipated since Weiss — a center-right provocateur known for her outspoken criticism of “wokeness” and support for Israel — was appointed atop CBS News in October. And now it’s here.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes was set to air a report on conditions in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has sent migrants. But Saturday night, Weiss intervened to spike the story, declaring it was not “ready” for publication. 

A flurry of leaks then ensued, including an internal email from Sharyn Alfonsi, a correspondent on the story. Alfonsi asserted it had been fully reviewed and approved by the network’s standards and legal team, and that Weiss’s move was therefore “political,” “a betrayal,” and “corporate censorship.”

Weiss’s own internal explanation then leaked: She insisted both that there was not enough new in the report and insisted it should include Trump officials giving an on-camera interview. “I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” she told the New York Times in a statement. Other criticisms she’d made internally about the piece were later leaked to Axios, and they boiled down to: not enough was done to explain the administration’s point of view.

Behind Weiss’s move, her critics suspect, is an effort to please Larry and David Ellison, the father-and-son billionaires who helped purchase CBS’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year. The Ellisons subsequently bought Weiss’s publication, the Free Press, making her very rich, and installed her atop a pillar of the mainstream media despite her lack of any experience in TV news.

The Ellisons are hoping the Trump administration will intervene to help them pull off another media mega-deal. The problem is that President Donald Trump has been very vocal about his unhappiness with 60 Minutes’s recent coverage of his administration — he’s insisted it’s gotten worse since the Ellisons took it over. The implied quid pro quo seems obvious: shape coverage of Trump more to his liking, or say goodbye to your media mega-deal. 

Yet there’s also a throughline that connects Weiss’s behavior here with her longstanding editorial line toward Trump — epitomized in the approach of the Free Press. That publication frequently runs criticisms of the Trump administration. But, typically, it tries to make sure it is done in a delicate and careful way, with sensitivity toward how its right-wing audience would receive it and care not to trigger them.

That is, when it comes to Trump, Weiss has long tried hard to be “politically correct.”

The billionaires behind the curtain

Let’s start by paying attention to the billionaires behind the curtain.

Larry Ellison has long supported Trump, and he and his son currently want the Trump administration to use antitrust review to scuttle Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, so they can combine WB with Paramount to create an entertainment and media powerhouse. 

But Trump is no cheap date. He’s making his price clear. 

On December 8, Trump complained on Truth Social that 60 Minutes aired an interview in which his onetime ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) criticized him. But he clarified that his “real problem with the show” wasn’t Greene, it was that ‘the new ownership” would even “allow a show like this to air.” He continued: “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP… Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”

He reiterated that complaint in another post Tuesday: “For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

Anonymously sourced reports from Trumpworld soon suggested that the Ellisons’ hopes for federal intervention may be in vain. And a fund that had supported the Ellisons’ bid — Affinity Partners, run by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — pulled out from the deal last week.

At a rally on Friday, Trump complained about 60 Minutes again, saying they’ve “treated me worse under the new ownership,” and that “they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”

The next day, on Saturday, Weiss decided to spike the CECOT story, which was set to air Sunday.

Bari Weiss’s political correctness toward Trump

Yet it isn’t exactly surprising that Weiss would be skeptical about a hard-hitting investigative report into the Trump administration’s abuses.

The Free Press is distinguished by its opposition to “wokeness” and its staunch support of Israel. But in contrast to other center-right publications that distinguished themselves from their more conservative brethren by criticizing Trump, Weiss’s Free Press was, at the very least, Trump-curious.

To be sure, the Free Press ran criticism of Trump. But Weiss criticized what she called the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction” to Trump in his first term, particularly scorning claims that he was a budding authoritarian. In fact, it was Trump’s critics, she said, who often proved “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian.”

So, in contrast to the Free Press’s hair-on-fire coverage of leftists on campus, the publication took a notably measured tone toward Trump’s second term. One go-to move for when the administration did something that was widely viewed as outrageous or terrible was to convene an expert roundtable — get some critics in there as well as some Trump supporters, and let the readers decide.

Trump was not, so far as we know, reading the Free Press. But the anti-woke audience Weiss was cultivating was full of Trump supporters, and to keep them subscribing, Weiss had to ensure the Free Press never became viewed as overtly anti-Trump, even after Trump regained office and began imposing a hardline agenda.

Some commentators who liked Weiss’s anti-wokeness takes were appalled by this turn. “The almost total avoidance of coverage of the current government threats to freedoms as basic as habeas corpus, due process and free speech on campus is quite something,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, adding: “When there is coverage, it’s nitpicking in order to defend Trump.”

We don’t actually know what the CBS News CECOT report contains. But it is common for investigative journalists to take an adversarial approach to the people in power — to expose abuses by them and try to hold them to account. In Alfonsi’s email, she framed her CECOT story as “giving voice to the voiceless.” Weiss’s longtime critique, though, is that she believes mainstream journalistic institutions became too adversarial and reflexively hostile to Donald Trump. 

Before Weiss founded the Free Press, she was a mid-level editor at the New York Times’s opinion section. But in summer 2020, she publicly posted her “Resignation Letter,” blasting the paper for what she said was progressive groupthink and a culture hostile to conservative or even centrist views.

In the letter, she complained that on certain topics, “self-censorship” had become “the norm” at the paper. She complained that politically sensitive pieces were treated according to a different set of rules and standards, and that they could run “only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.”

This sounds like what Weiss is doing right now. Some of the criticisms she’s made of the CECOT story — that it doesn’t have on-camera interviews with Trump officials and doesn’t break enough news — sound strained, unconvincing, and unlikely to be the true reason for this high-profile last-minute intervention. 

Rather, Weiss saw a torrent of criticism from the right (and, plausibly, Trump himself) headed her way, made an awkward intervention to try to prevent it from happening, and consequently created a far greater uproar.

The Trump administration was legally required to release all documents related to federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein by Friday, with only limited grounds for withholding documents and full explanations required for any redactions.

It did not do this. Or anything close to it.

The Justice Department released several thousand documents Friday, but top officials acknowledged that they had hundreds of thousands more that weren’t released yet, purportedly because they weren’t reviewed or ready. Most of the documents they did release were photos — either photos the FBI took of Epstein’s properties, or photos Epstein himself possessed. Of the investigative documents released, many were entirely redacted, covered in black boxes.

Some of the leading Republicans who’d pushed the administration for disclosure expressed disappointment in their compliance, with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) saying the release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

Unsurprisingly, these limited releases do nothing to clear up the swirling questions people had about the Epstein scandal. 

And while some of those swirling questions amount to conspiracy theories that will never be definitively cleared up by any document release, there is one big question that could be answered to some extent by documents in the government’s possession.

Namely, did investigators believe there were other men involved in Epstein’s sex crimes, and if so, why didn’t they charge any of them?

The Justice Department has documents that would answer this question

Officials at the Justice Department have been very clear that they believe Epstein sexually abused at least hundreds of women or underage girls in the 1990s and 2000s.

But officials have been much less clear on a related question: whether Epstein trafficked certain of these women or girls to any of his prominent and influential friends.

Certain Epstein accusers — most notably, the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre — claimed that this is indeed what happened to them. Giuffre said publicly that Epstein groomed her to have sex with him and his influential friends in exchange for money, which she did for a few years. And Giuffre specifically named some of the men who she said participated, including the UK’s now-former Prince Andrew.

The FBI has been aware of Giuffre’s allegations since 2011. One of the documents in the new release describes some of officials’ conversations with Giuffre that year, in which she “indicated Epstein had instructed her to have sex with numerous associates in both the United States and overseas.” 

It is primarily Giuffre’s claims that convinced many people that Epstein was not only abusing victims himself, but that he was also providing young women and underage girls to other men.

Yet no other men were ever charged with Epstein-related crimes. And the big question is: why not?

There are many possible explanations, ranging from the prosaic (evidentiary problems, statutes of limitation) to the nefarious (cover-up) to somewhere in between (questions about witness credibility). But surely, at some point, someone involved in the investigation wrote something down about this, assessing whether Giuffre’s claims appeared credible, whether other women made similar claims, and whether such claims merited further investigation — or not.

More broadly, investigators had to at some point grapple with whether they themselves thought the evidence suggested Epstein was supplying girls or young women to his friends. 

Typically, such internal assessments would never see the light of day if they didn’t result in charges. But they should be somewhere in the Justice Department’s Epstein files. So will we ever see them, or not?

Hundreds of thousands of pages of the Justice Department’s files related to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein are set to be released Friday, and though all the files won’t be released just yet, this batch is sure to create a frenzy on social media when it drops.

The Epstein scandal is an important national story, and key questions about it remain unanswered. Hopefully these documents will shed some light on these questions. Valuable and even revelatory information could well be in the released files somewhere.

But as the hivemind of the internet grapples with this imminent release, one thing that’s sure to ensue is an onslaught of misleading, out of context, or outright wrong claims — many of which will go viral — about what these files show.

The way social media functions, this is inevitable. People will post anything they see that looks suspicious or damning, and the posts that express the most outrage will go the most viral. In some cases, this viral outrage may be merited; in others, it won’t.

The documented facts about Epstein — that he abused hundreds of young women and underage girls, while maintaining friendships with powerful and influential people — are damning. They’ve helped make the Epstein saga the mother of all conspiracy theories, with something for practically every political faction to obsess over. Any tidbit in the files that can conceivably be used to bolster the darkest theories will be so used.

The nature of investigatory files, though, is that they will include a ton of information that is hearsay, rumor, unproven, or false. This, my colleague Ian Millhiser recently wrote, is why the Department of Justice typically doesn’t release files like these — because they could smear people with false or unproven information, without giving them a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law.

Elon Musk’s X is a sewer where the most virulent right-wing-coded conspiracy theories regularly go viral. It’s beyond hope. But Democrats — and many journalists, particularly in their social media posts — haven’t always reacted all that responsibly to these Epstein revelations either. (Last month, House Democrats released an email in which Epstein said Trump had spent “hours” with a victim at his house; however, it quickly emerged that the victim in question has long said Trump never abused her.)

But I cling to the hope that there are people out there who are legitimately interested in trying to find out what actually happened, and who are not just looking for ammo to use against their political opponents or prove the conspiracy theories they’re already completely sure are true. So if you, dear reader, are interested in advice on how to consume the Epstein files responsibly, read onward.

What not to do

To many, it looked damning. Just last month, the New York Times’s David Brooks had written a column arguing that there was too much focus on the Epstein story. On Thursday, after a new release by House Democrats, it turned out that Brooks was in the Epstein files, implicated, photographed, hobnobbing with the man himself! Clearly, his column was an enormous ethical violation, covering up his own complicity!

But was any of that actually true?

In fact, Brooks told reporter Max Tani Thursday that he’s never even met Epstein. He said he attended a TED conference in 2011 “and was invited to an adjacent dinner.” He continued: “There were about 60 people there if memory serves. Apparently Epstein was also at this dinner. I don’t think we met or exchanged a word. I never heard of Epstein until I read a Miami Herald story about him in 2018. I’ve never had any contact with him by email or any other means.”

Brooks’s clarification does, in fact, still tell us something about Epstein’s influence; the dinner in question, an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” was put on by an organization called Edge that was in part funded by Epstein. But Epstein wasn’t the face of the organization or the dinner, and he wasn’t very well-known nationally then (in 2011). So on its face, Brooks’s account — that he went there to have dinner with a bunch of billionaires and had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein — sounds plausible.

But many on social media were already convinced of his malfeasance. After all, there was a picture of him in the Epstein files! (Even though the picture in question was one of several from the dinner that had been on Edge’s website for years.) Clearly, they argued, Brooks’s denials must be lies. So in the minds of many, Brooks is guilty until proven innocent, and if prior experience is any guide, the denunciations of him will be far more viral than any attempt by him to correct the record.

A more responsible way of assessing this information would have been to pause and assess what it actually shows, which was: House Democrats released a picture of Brooks at a dinner that Epstein also attended. Pausing to try to ascertain when the dinner was, who else attended, and other basic facts would have been the responsible reaction. Instead, the default social media response was to run around like a chicken with its head cut off and yell: “David Brooks is in the Epstein files!”

Focus on the big picture

So what actually matters in the Epstein scandal?

People have different unanswered questions. How did he make his money? Was he tied to intelligence agencies in some way? Did he really kill himself? Was Trump involved in his crimes?

Journalists have tried to answer these questions — take, for instance, the two new lengthy Times reports on Epstein’s money and his friendship with Trump. The government has offered other answers, asserting that, yes, its investigation found he did kill himself. But many people have been unsatisfied with these answers, believing there must be more to the story.

Personally, the biggest unanswered questions I have about the Epstein scandal that the files could conceivably shed light on are: Did investigators believe other men committed sex crimes with Epstein, and, if so, why weren’t any of them charged?

For background: Hundreds of women have accused Epstein of sexually abusing them in the 1990s or 2000s. There is also a smaller subset of that vast group of victims that has said Epstein trafficked them to other men as well. 

This, of course, has been the centerpiece of Epstein theories — that he was not just a solo sexual predator, but rather a procurer and supplier of young women and underage girls to his wealthy, powerful, and influential friends.

Yet none of these male friends has ever been charged by prosecutors with any crimes related to Epstein. (The only other person charged was Epstein’s longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell.)

So what did investigators conclude about the claims from certain Epstein accusers that other men were involved in his crimes? Why didn’t they bring charges about it?

That’s what I’ll be looking for in the files: candid assessments from prosecutors and investigators about what the evidence showed and why they didn’t move forward with charging anyone else. I have no idea if the Trump administration will choose to release this information — they could conceivably use loopholes to avoid doing so — but I’ll be on the lookout for it.

In contrast, information from the investigation phase — tips, rumors, leads — should be taken with several grains of salt. Not every source being interviewed by the FBI is honest. Not every lead checks out. 

But the broader takeaway is that, if you’re interested in assessing whether something is actually true, you should assess where the information is coming from, how reliable it seems, whether it’s corroborated, whether it fits the timeline of what we know about the scandal, and more. You should not just take something as gospel truth because “it’s in the Epstein files!”

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent the political world into a frenzy by releasing two damning-looking emails Jeffrey Epstein had sent about Donald Trump.

The committee’s Republicans then followed up by releasing thousands more Epstein emails and documents, containing embarrassing revelations about various other public figures. But the GOP and the White House also pushed back, arguing that the revelations about Trump were less than met the eye.

All of this is just an appetizer for the push for public disclosure of the “Epstein files” held by the Justice Department. A months-long effort to get a majority of the House to sign a petition that would force a vote on the matter finally won its 218th signature Wednesday. A House vote on the Epstein files is now expected in December, and if it passes, the matter will advance to the Senate.

President Trump seems highly worried about this possibility. This week, he tried to strong-arm some Republican House members into dropping their signatures from the petition, including by having officials summon Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to the Situation Room.

We don’t know what, if anything, Trump is trying to prevent from getting out through the DOJ’s Epstein files. But as we await their potential release, it’s worth taking a closer look at the newly-released Epstein emails about Trump, to assess what they actually show. Doing this requires some decoding.

“That dog that hasn’t barked is trump”

The email that got the most attention is from Epstein to his companion and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Dated April 2, 2011, it says (typos included):

I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virignia  spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.    police chief. etc.     im 75 % there

When House Democrats first released the email, they redacted the name Virginia and replaced it with “VICTIM.” And the release was taken on social media as a bombshell. It appeared to show, well, Epstein saying Trump had spent hours at his house with a victim. And what explanation could there be for that other than a sexual one?

Yet Republicans soon cried foul, revealing the redacted name was Virginia — a reference to Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent public accuser, who died earlier this year.

This changed the email’s meaning significantly because, in years of depositions, litigation, and a memoir published posthumously earlier this year, Giuffre was consistent that Trump was never a participant in Epstein’s sex crimes involving her. She accused Epstein of trafficking her to other prominent men — but said repeatedly that those men did not include Trump. Unless she was lying, this email then does not mean that Trump abused an Epstein victim.

So what could Epstein have meant in the email?

Some important context here is that, according to reporting by Epstein correspondent (and pal) Michael Wolff, Epstein had wondered whether Trump played some part in bringing about his legal woes due to a falling-out they’d had. The emails appear to nod to this idea. 

The belief, floated by House Speaker Mike Johnson among others, that Trump helped bring Epstein down by informing the authorities, has been much mocked and lacks any corroboration. However, Wolff did claim that Epstein himself thought this might have been true, though Epstein purportedly believed Trump was motivated by personal pique over a property auction rather than a heroic desire to save abused women. 

Trump and Epstein were close pals throughout much of the 1990s and early 2000s — a time when they were frequently photographed together at parties in New York and Florida. This time encompasses Trump’s infamous “birthday book” message to Epstein, and Trump’s similarly infamous quote to a reporter that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

But in 2004, this friendship came to an end — reportedly because Trump and Epstein had a bidding war against each other over the same Florida mansion, and things got quite bitter.

Shortly after the auction’s conclusion, the Palm Beach police received a tip that young women had been seen at Epstein’s home, according to a later deposition by the department’s police chief.

The first major law enforcement investigation into Epstein didn’t kick off until the following year, in 2005, when a 14-year-old girl and her parents went to the Palm Beach police, accusing Epstein of molesting her during a massage. But — according to Wolff — Epstein had privately wondered whether it was Trump who was responsible for the initial tip. 

Epstein resolved that initial investigation with what was later called a sweetheart plea deal, but his victims soon began suing him civilly. These lawsuits were at first filed from “Jane Does,” but in 2011, one of them — Virginia Roberts Giuffre — came forward to put her name to her accusations, becoming Epstein’s most prominent accuser.

Shortly after that, in 2011, Epstein sent that newly-released email to Maxwell, which I’ll quote again:

I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virignia  spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.    police chief. etc.     im 75 % there

The email may be an expression of Epstein’s suspicion that Trump is behind his legal woes. He’s asking, why hasn’t Trump’s name been mentioned in the investigation and lawsuits? He’s saying Giuffre, his lead public accuser, had spent time with Trump, so perhaps he was behind her coming forward. And he’s perhaps alluding to how the “police chief” got his tip, perhaps saying he’s “75% there” toward thinking it was Trump.

“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop”

A second email that is being treated as damning was sent by Epstein to Wolff on January 31, 2019. It reads:

(REDACTED) worked at mara lago. . she was the one that accused prince andrew. . trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop 

Epstein’s claim that “of course” Trump “knew about the girls” has gotten a great deal of attention, but it should also be noted that the sentence concludes “as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

This likely refers to the reports that Epstein and Maxwell were recruiting girls from the Mar-a-Lago spa to become his “masseuses” — Giuffre, for one, had worked there. Trump spoke about this earlier this year when he claimed Epstein had “taken” people from his spa, and said he intervened to stop that.

Indeed, as far as back as 2007, an anonymous source told Page Six, about Epstein: “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things…Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.” (The reader may decide whether that anonymous source sounds like John Barron.)

So on one hand, Epstein’s statement sounds damning: Trump knew about the girls! On the other hand, what Epstein then says is that Trump asked Maxwell “to stop” — presumably, to stop recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago.

That email, then, also doesn’t really corroborate the idea that Trump was a participant in Epstein’s sex crimes — though in assessing its candor, we should keep in mind that Epstein is writing to a journalist, not a trusted associate like Maxwell.

It’s important to get the timeline straight

In the frenzy of interest over the newly-released Epstein emails, decontextualized tidbits have been rocketed across social media and been treated as damning. But there have also been a lot of misinterpretations and misreadings. If the DOJ’s Epstein files ever do get released, that will likely continue.

In my view, the most helpful thing to keep in mind when assessing the import of new information about the Trump/Epstein relationship, is that the relationship had two phases:

1. From the 1990s to about 2004, Trump and Epstein were friends, frequently seen together, exchanging bawdy messages, etc.
2. After 2004, they had a falling out, reportedly over that mansion auction; the reporting has been quite consistent that this was a bitter falling-out and their relationship did not continue after that.

Naturally, Trump’s defenders are preferring to focus on the second phase. Indeed, after this week’s release of tens of thousands of Epstein’s emails, many claimed there was surprisingly little about Trump. But those emails were from the 2010s.

It’s more likely that the things Trump’s most worried about in the Epstein files would be about the earlier period, when Trump and Epstein really were close — things like Trump’s birthday book message to Epstein: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”