Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg/Getty Images
As Donald Trump steamrolled his agenda through Congress this year, there was usually just one Republican dissenter, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. A gadfly libertarian, he constantly opposed Trump on both foreign and domestic policy, and Trump openly threatened to have him primaried. On Tuesday, though, Massie got the upper hand. In a 427-1 vote, his bill to release the Jeffrey Epstein files passed the House.
It was like the world turned upside down for Republicans, with some of the most outlandish ones standing victorious while Trump was forced to retreat by his own party after so recently dominating it on Capitol Hill. For years, Trump never allowed Republicans to distance themselves from him and even celebrated the defeat of moderates in 2018 who were squishy on him. This week, facing scores of Republicans voting against him, he yielded.
Trump may not be a lame-duck president yet — he still has three years left in office, and his endorsement in a Republican primary is still considered a de facto anointment — but he showed weakness within his party for the first time since his reelection, putting himself in conflict with the MAGA base.
The defeat began as a small Republican rebellion in the face of Trump’s determined opposition. Massie and three other Republicans with a penchant for controversy — Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, and Marjorie Taylor Greene — joined with every single Democrat to sign a petition to force a vote on the bill over the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson. The petition lingered for months until, 50 days after she won a special election, Johnson allowed Democrat Adelita Grijalva to be sworn in last week, providing the final critical signature.
Trump and his allies waged a ferocious fight to prevent a vote, even summoning Boebert to the White House Situation Room for top law-enforcement officials to plead with her to withdraw her name from the petition. It didn’t work. In a Sunday-night Truth Social post, Trump urged Republicans to vote for the bill he had tried to quash because “we have nothing to hide and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax.” After all, it was going to pass, and being pro-Epstein is not exactly a politically popular stance with voters. As Johnson put it diplomatically in his press conference before the vote, “None of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency.”
It was the biggest rebuke by his own party in Congress that Trump has ever suffered, and he failed to hold together normally loyal Republicans. “We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the Speaker of the House, and the vice-president to get this win,” Massie said after the bill passed, adding sardonically, “But they are on our side today, so let’s give them some credit as well.”
Outside the Capitol, Republican strategists were befuddled that Trump had committed so much effort to the fight in the first place. One pointed out that the president “directly contradicted the base,” noting that Epstein had been used as a cudgel by MAGA personalities for years and that it was a stretch too far even for Trump to tell his loyalists that Epstein was a nonissue. Another strategist close to the White House speculated Trump’s opposition was because Trump’s friends and donors with connections to Epstein pushed him to protect their reputations — to say nothing of Trump’s own well-documented relationship with Epstein.
Trump loyalists continued to defend their leader, calling the idea that this vote harmed his political standing ridiculous. “He told us to vote for it … One person voted against him today,” says Randy Fine of Florida. “That sounds like a pretty clear win to me.”
Democrats still expressed hope that Tuesday would loosen Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP. “It’s certainly evidence that he doesn’t have the sway that he probably believed he had, when you have to do a 180 degree flip on something,” says Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. When asked if he thought this defeat meant Trump is becoming a lame-duck president, the swing-state Democrat added, “Let’s certainly hope so.”
Barring some shocking revelations in the files, once they are released, about Trump’s own personal conduct, the Epstein saga will eventually fade away. After all, even Democrats concede voters care more about affordability than the late sex trafficker.
But in a year that started with Trump jamming through Mike Johnson as Speaker over objections within the GOP and that featured the president steamrolling hardline conservatives into supporting the Republican spending megabill that became his signature legislation, this was an unmistakable loss. For a president who appeared to be invincible within his own party, even a small wound shows that he is mortal.
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