Take note Politico.
EPSTEIN! EPSTEIN! EPSTEIN! It has been used so much that it is no longer effective according to Ed Kilgore of New York magazine. Much as Kilgore would like to see President Donald Trump's popularity decline due to the media constantly trying to connect him with Jeffrey Epstein, it is just not working. Kilgore pretty much threw the towel into the ring on Thursday in "Why Trump’s Epstein Files Scandal May Not Be Hurting Him After All."
It has become an iron tenet of contemporary politics that developments that would massively affect the standing in public opinion of most politicians have little or no effect, positively or negatively, on Donald Trump. He’s the most galvanizing public figure in living memory, and his vast history of controversy and scandal appear to have made him as impervious to breaking news as a cockroach is impervious to radiation.
And as Nate Silver explains after looking at every bit of available public-opinion research, there just isn’t much specific evidence that the Epstein files scandal and cover-up are moving the numbers. Indeed, when it comes to the more specific claim that the “crisis” over Epstein is wreaking havoc in Trump’s MAGA base, the evidence suggests strongly otherwise:
Sad. So sad. And yet they tried so hard. Politico even recently had five Epstein stories running on their front page followed days later by a flurry of another six Epstein stories published within 24 hours of each other.
Because heavy Epstein coverage is displacing other damaging-to-Trump stories, Nate is skeptical that more incessant coverage will start hurting Trump:
Sniff! Perhaps time to put the overused Epstein doll in the storage locker with the Avenatti puppet.
This obviously goes out the window, though, if there really is fire beneath the smoke, if the White House keeps engaging in cover-up tactics, and if the story won’t go away because the president himself keeps feeding it oxygen. And for what it’s worth, Trump officials are reportedly worried about losing a slice of his MAGA base over the scandal. But absent the emergence of pornographic images featuring the leader of the Free World, reactions to the Epstein story will likely continue to polarize, particularly if Trump continues to feed his base the bloodiest red meat of Obama or Biden or Clinton revenge narratives, stemming the appetite for Epstein files revelations.
Nate Silver thinks the whole story may be remembered much like Russiagate, an obsessive elite liberal preoccupation that appeared to make voters simply confirm whatever they thought about Trump before. We have no way of knowing that until the loose threads are all tracked down and this chapter of the Epstein story has a beginning, a middle, and, at long last, an end.
Well, at least you've given some very slim hope to the folks at Politico to keep their Epstein candle lit. However, since you mentioned Russiagate, it seems that now the media focus on Epstein primarily seems to be a desperate attempt to avoid covering the new documented revelations by DNI Tulsi Gabbard about Russiagate.
