Force A Referendum On The Epstein Coverup

A reader of Wednesday’s Off Message pointed me to this Wednesday night exchange on MSNBC between Stephanie Ruhle and Mark McKinnon, the former-Republican political strategist.

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Ruhle asks, in essence, why Donald Trump has been so solicitous of the child predator Ghislaine Maxwell, and why Maxwell thinks Trump might offer her clemency, and McKinnon muses that the Trump-Epstein scandal will ultimately fizzle.

I don’t think it’s fatal politically, because again, how many people out there are surprised today that Donald Trump was in these emails? I think very few, really. And I think the thing that Democrats have to be careful is prosecute this to the fullest extent, get them on their heels, but get back to affordability. This is not going to win the election.

I don’t mean to pick on McKinnon, or anyone in particular. I only mean to stress that Democrats in Congress are engulfed in this conventional wisdom, same as every time they’re tempted by an explosive Trump scandal. And they need to hear the alternative case.

It’d be nice to think Democrats have noticed that downplaying Trump’s scandals to better emphasize kitchen-table issues has a poor track record. And to their credit, they’ve struck a decent balance these past few months between economic appeals and the drumbeat for Epstein disclosure.

But I’m familiar with this pattern, how apt Democrats are to rush back to safe issues when partisan confrontation gets rough and tumble. And so I want to run forward the logic of “get[ting] back to affordability,” how it prefigures another surrender—another demonstration of weakness—right before the next presidential election.

What would it mean, in practice, for Democrats to “get [Republicans] on their heels, but get back to affordability”? I think the advice means something like: Don’t leave voters with the impression that you’re more concerned with the contents of the Epstein files (or any lurid matter) than with their material struggles. To the extent you have agenda-setting power, use it to drive public attention to issues like health care, rather than the Epstein files.

I confess to a general skepticism of this line of strategic thinking. I’ve seen Democrats run on health-care appeals cycle after cycle and lose about half the time. I’ve seen elections turn on the politics of an overseas Ebola outbreak and an email-server. It frequently matters what’s on voters minds, how they understand the parties and their leaders, in the moments before close elections, and it’s thus important to exploit issues that get people talking. Policy almost never gets people talking.

I’m particularly skeptical in this case. You can have a very low opinion of the electorate, of the moral intuitions of swing voters, and still think they’d vote against a pedophile even if they thought he was a better steward of the economy, or a safe vote to defend their cultural values. This is how Democrat Doug Jones became a senator in Alabama—not because he talked about affordability, but because Roy Moore was a child predator.

Now imagine we had no pertinent recent history—that Democrats could only assess their options from the politics of the moment. What do the politics of the moment tell us about how Republicans perceive their own vulnerabilities?

“Getting back to affordability” means trying to divide Republicans over economic policy: Legislation reclaiming tariff authority would make things more affordable. Stubbornly above-target inflation suggests deficit reduction would help, too. Restoring Affordable Care Act subsidies would certainly make health insurance more affordable for 10-plus million people.

How many Republicans have run scared from votes on those issues? How many GOP votes would you expect for legislation to increase rich people’s taxes? How many Republicans have defected by voting to rescind Trump’s lawless tariffs?

By contrast: Having failed to abet Trump’s coverup, how many House Republicans do we expect to vote to release the Epstein files next week? 50? 100? If gaining the political upper hand entails uniting your own party and dividing the opposition, the numbers tell a simple story: Epstein is more fruitful terrain than affordability.