The Morning: The Epstein saga
Plus, flash floods, the Supreme Court and Andrew Cuomo.
The Morning
July 15, 2025

Good morning. Here’s the latest news:

  • Supreme Court: The justices allowed the Trump administration to proceed with firing more than a thousand Education Department workers.
  • Storms: In New York, heavy rains flooded parts of the subway. (See a video.) New Jersey declared a state of emergency. Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania have flash flood warnings. Follow updates here.
  • New York mayor’s race: Andrew Cuomo will run as a third-party candidate against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee.

We have more below. But first, we take a look at the MAGA base’s attachment to Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories.

President Tramp standing on a tarmac in front of three large microphones.
President Trump  Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

A revolt

Author Headshot

By Shawn McCreesh

I cover the White House.

After years spent spreading spidery conspiracy theories for his own political gain, President Trump has found himself wrapped up in the stickiest one of them of all. For more than a week, the political movement he created has convulsed with righteous fury over Jeffrey Epstein and the things the administration has said and done — or rather not done — about his death.

Trump’s supporters simply cannot swallow the anticlimactic conclusion that the Justice Department reached eight days ago when it said: There’s nothing to see here, folks. No secret client list, no ties to foreign governments, no clique of Washington protectors who shielded the financier and his friends from justice for preying on girls. Over the weekend, a rabble of conspiracists who’ve been hand-fed for years by Trump broke into open revolt.

The fallout is testing the power that the president holds over his most loyal followers, the ones who’ve trusted him all along and who believed they would learn a whole lot more about the Epstein saga if they returned Trump to office.

The unconvinced

Attorney General Pam Bondi, center, looking at President Trump, who is out of focus.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general.  Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Maybe the revolt will sputter out, but it has been stunning to behold. It is a Möbius strip of paranoia and distrust: A political movement that began with a conspiracy theory — lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace were central to Trump’s rise — is cannibalizing itself over another conspiracy theory.

And in a novel twist, Trump’s usual playbook for getting himself out of trouble didn’t work. In a social media post on Saturday, he blamed Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for unresolved Epstein mysteries.

But the base wasn’t buying it. “People are really upset at the outright dismissal of it,” said Natalie Winters, a 24-year-old protégé of Stephen Bannon. As Mike Cernovich, the prolific pro-Trump social media commentator, wrote online, “Trump’s persuasive power over his base, especially during his first term, was almost magical. … The reaction on Epstein should thus be startling to him.”

One person close to Trump conceded that the president didn’t grasp how deep and wide the discontent was because he doesn’t spend all that much time on the internet, where Epstein conspiracies breed. The 79-year-old president’s media diet consists primarily of cable news and print newspapers. But by Monday, news networks like CNN were devoting much more airtime to the uproar.

A test of loyalty

This is not the first time Trump’s base has bristled at him. The faithful grumbled when he encouraged Americans to take Covid vaccines or dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities.

But the conjecture around Epstein’s crimes and death is a many-layered mania that can’t really be compared to anything else. The shadowy concepts that undergird the whole thing go to the “very foundation of MAGA,” as Winters put it, because “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.”

She lamented that Trump and the people who work for him now had campaigned against the deep state and failed to deliver. “Finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar — and I don’t believe that — or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.”

The fallout is fundamentally about whether Trump can corral the conspiracy-driven forces that he weaponized. He sprang to power at a time of deep mistrust in this country after two wars and a financial crisis, selling himself as the only one who would tell the truth about a corrupt uniparty cabal that sold out the United States.

But now that he is the one in control of the government, he is telling his supporters to move on from all of that. It has left many of them mystified.

AM I EMPLOYED?

Martin Basch, left and Erin Czajkowski.
Martin Basch and Erin Czajkowski. Maddie McGarvey and Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

When the Department of Government Efficiency started slashing government jobs, its goal was to streamline America’s bureaucracy. Until that happens, though, many federal workers are on an emotional roller coaster. They’ve been fired and rehired; their health insurance has stopped; their questions have gone unanswered. Eileen Sullivan spoke with workers left in the lurch. For instance:

  • Erin Czajkowski was axed from her job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in February, rehired in March, then fired again in May. She spent weeks trying to understand court orders and legal challenges to her firing. “Honestly, I need this to be over,” she told The Times.
  • Martin Basch was terminated in February from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. He started applying for unemployment benefits but was confused when paychecks began arriving again in his bank account. He later learned that a court case had led to his reinstatement.
  • Sarah Garman was fired from the Internal Revenue Service in February and then reinstated in March because of a court order. But when she got back on the government’s payroll, her health coverage was suspended — even as premiums were still being deducted from her paychecks.

Read the full story here.

THE LATEST NEWS

Flash Floods

A car partially submerged in an expanse of floodwater outside a Lidl food market, by night.
In Cranford, N.J. Brian Fraser for The New York Times
  • Slow-moving storms have dumped several inches of rain across the Mid-Atlantic, causing long flight delays in New York and inundating roads in New Jersey.
  • The National Weather Service said two cities in Virginia risked “catastrophic” damage from flash floods and urged people there to move to higher ground.
  • More heavy rainfall is expected throughout today.

Education

  • The Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to fire Education Department workers represents an expansion of presidential power: It lets Trump gut a government department created by Congress without legislators’ input.
  • Trump had already started to diminish the Education Department before the court’s decision. It is now about half the size that it was when Trump took office in January.
  • Twenty-four states sued the Trump administration over nearly $7 billion in education funding that it has withheld a few weeks before the start of the school year.

War in Ukraine

  • Trump said he would help Europe send more weapons to Ukraine and threatened “very severe tariffs” on Russia’s trading partners unless it reaches a peace deal within 50 days.
  • The Pentagon said details of the arms sales weren’t finished, and some experts doubt the credibility of the tariff threat.
  • Trump also criticized Vladimir Putin for Russia’s heavy air assaults on Ukraine, saying, “My conversations with him are very pleasant, and then the missiles go off at night.”
  • In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a plan to replace the prime minister with a loyalist. Critics called it a consolidation of power.

Middle East

An encampment with buildings on the periphery.
In Rafah, southern Gaza, last year. Hatem Ali/Associated Press

Trade

Trump Administration

Other Big Stories

  • Tech giants built water-guzzling data centers in Georgia to power the A.I. race. Then the neighbors’ faucets and toilets stopped working.
  • Officials in Kerr County, Texas, where flash floods killed dozens of people earlier this month, said they had received death threats over their response to the tragedy.
  • A fire engulfed an assisted living residence in southern Massachusetts, killing nine people, officials said. Trapped people smashed windows and screamed for help.

OPINIONS

Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, writes Omer Bartov, an expert on genocides and former Israeli soldier.

Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on Trump’s base and Epstein and Thomas Edsall on eroding democracy in America.

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