Donald Trump had already suffered a significant setback last week after Republicans’ bruising losses in off-year elections suggested voters were turning against his policies and he was struggling to rally his base.
But House Democrats brought the US president to a low point of his second term on Wednesday when they released emails from the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that included damaging messages about him.
The hit to Mr Trump is particularly harmful because it threatens to amplify a rift within his own “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement that has been widening in recent weeks over issues ranging from his struggle to bring down inflation to his defence of the need for highly skilled foreign workers.
The US president’s approval ratings have languished at 43 per cent, with 54 per cent disapproving. It represents the widest deficit of his second term, according to the Realclearpolitics.com polling average. By Wednesday afternoon, Mr Trump was trying to limit the damage within his coalition.
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“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding: “Only a very bad or stupid Republican would fall into that trap.”
The so-called Epstein files that contain information about federal investigations into the disgraced financier have been a sensitive subject on the right. While many of Trump’s supporters expected his second administration to release all of the documents related to the case, it has done so very selectively.
The initial documents Democrats published on Wednesday contained emails in which Epstein said Mr Trump had “spent hours at my house”, “knew about the girls” and was “the dog that hasn’t barked”, raising new questions about the president’s links with Epstein.
House Republicans later published the full tranche of more than 20,000 documents Epstein’s estate turned over to Congress after accusing their Democratic counterparts of “cherry picking” messages.
Mr Trump has said he was friends with Epstein for 15 years but that they fell out more than 20 years ago. He has denied any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the documents released on Wednesday had been leaked to create a “fake narrative” about the president and to “smear” him.
But on Wednesday evening, Mike Johnson, the loyal speaker of the House of Representatives, said that he was going to hold a vote on a resolution to publish the full Epstein files next week. Adelita Grijalva, a new Democratic Representative, was sworn in on Wednesday and almost immediately signed a petition triggering a vote on the House floor on the issue.
Several Republicans close to the president, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace, have also backed the measure.
The fresh Epstein furore is unfolding as Trump faces unusual pressure from the right, where there is growing dissatisfaction with his focus on foreign policy rather than an unrelenting drive towards tackling cost-of-living concerns that led to his 2024 victory. Some of his backers were further baffled by his decision to host Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda militant, at the White House this week.
On the domestic front, Mr Trump’s Republican critics latched on to his recent comments defending the need for universities to accept foreign students to sustain their finances and companies’ use of H1B visas for high-skilled workers, which many right-wing populists have opposed.
“Did I mention that Trump’s not perfect?” Steve Bannon, his former political strategist, said on his War Room podcast on Wednesday. “He’s an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. If you didn’t have him . . . you wouldn’t have anything.”
But a Republican-led drumbeat of doubt about Mr Trump has been growing. A plan floated by the president to back 50-year mortgages was widely panned on the right.
“You’re just charging more and stretching it out. It’s like solving hunger by not giving food but just giving longer straws to people,” said Glenn Beck, the conservative media host. “It’s not freedom, it’s trapping you . . . it’s renting disguised as home ownership.”
Ms Greene, who has signed on to the Epstein petition opposed by Trump in the House, issued a broadside on X on Wednesday against some of the administration’s policies, saying she was against Americans “being replaced by foreign labour, like with H1Bs” and “against allowing foreign students into our colleges and universities”.
“I am America First and America Only. This is my way and there is no other way to be.”
Mr Trump has bristled at these internal attacks. This week, he said the Georgia congresswoman had “lost her way” – and during an unusually combative interview with Fox News, he sought to reclaim the mantle of his own populism, at a time when it is being questioned.
“Don’t forget Maga was my idea. Maga was nobody else’s idea. I know what Maga wants better than anybody else,” he said. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
