Democrats Get the Epstein Wars Wrong
They are trivializing themselves just as their party senses a possible return to power.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 14, 2025 5:14 pm ET
I know nothing beyond what’s in the press, but I somehow doubt Donald Trump was among the needy types who relied on Jeffrey Epstein for access to women they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. It’s a point we’ll come back to.
Interesting and perhaps surprising advice has been flowing from the Democratic Party’s loyal handicappers after this month’s gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. Don’t make impeachment the calling card in next year’s congressional midterms, they say. Consistent overbetting on the unpopularity of Mr. Trump has been the reciprocal of every blown opportunity till now. This includes the 2024 presidential race, which was winnable even amid the Democratic Party’s world-historical malpractices.
Unfortunately this advice conflicts with activists who insisted Democrats show “fight” with the thankless government shutdown that finally ended this week. Now they want more “fight” over Epstein. Never mind that this represents the sorriest possible way of building on recent electoral successes and Mr. Trump’s shrinking approval ratings.
Read carefully in a press somewhat chastened by its previous misreporting and you learn a couple of things. Mr. Trump and Epstein socialized in Palm Beach, but Epstein and his chief accuser, the late Virginia Giuffre, both left clear testimony Mr. Trump never behaved improperly.
In one of three emails leaked by Democrats to create this week’s furor, Epstein says Mr. Trump “knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.” To some of Mr. Trump’s shrillest defenders, this slight hint that Mr. Trump, then a private citizen, might have done more is reason to change the subject to a prior administration’s supposedly “sweetheart” plea deal with Epstein.
They forget its “sweetheart” nature was a description long after the fact by the Miami Herald to slur Mr. Trump. The original plea outcome may have been weak due to a desire to accommodate his victims’ reluctance to testify. But the only “sweetheart” effort came later when the office of the Democratic district attorney of New York County, with the illustrious name of Cyrus Vance Jr., tried to use their nontestimony to reduce Epstein’s sex-offender designation.
Which is exactly the risk Democrats now court. House Republicans answered this week’s selective Democratic release with a deluge of files that tell us nothing new about Mr. Trump but show Democrats like Larry Summers and former Obama White House lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler carrying on with Epstein long after his crimes were known. Down this road lies an obvious risk for the left: Bill Clinton and friends, who were the real power elite Epstein sought to cultivate in his criminal heyday.
To return to Mr. Trump’s history of womanizing: I erred in 2016 in believing his personal baggage would make him a risky nominee. In office, I thought he would be trammeled like no president in history by attacks on his businesses and his history of financial and personal scandals.
Wrong. All this disappeared from the public discourse in favor of a made-up story about Russia. In essence, Democrats immunized him from his own past by accusing him of the one thing of which he could be found innocent. A great enigma of political psychology, the place to look might be the psyche of Rachel Maddow. For reasons Dr. Freud might fathom, she was the left media’s most ardent promoter of the distraction that removed from Mr. Trump the weight of 35 years of tabloidal infamy.
A decade later, it takes Epstein, a certified [forbidden topic], to get Democrats past their discomfort with censoriousness about sex. They and the media are impelled forward by the idea that Mr. Trump resists Epstein disclosure out of personal desperation. In fact, his resistance is the only thing baiting them on and it may not be an accident. He calls it the Epstein “hoax,” a word, it pays to remember, with a specific resonance in Trumpspeak.
Meanwhile, in the wings are the Democrats he and Republicans really fear—the winners of this month’s New Jersey and Virginia races, the popular governors of Pennsylvania, Colorado and Kentucky.
Many GOP-leaning big-money donors, I’m here to tell you, find these folks easier to deal with than Mr. Trump and his acolytes.
What keeps these Democrats from power are the antics of their national party: the Russia folly, the border folly, the trans folly, the Biden incapacity folly. The Epstein distraction bids to be another piece of foolishness that does more to inhibit Democrats’ return to real influence than advance it.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/democrat...wrong-93c6210a
