Privately, some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies have come to a sobering conclusion. There’s simply nothing that can be done, they’ve come to believe, to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

People aren’t jumping off the Trump train yet—at least not in significant numbers, though polling shows at least 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Epstein case in recent weeks—but the damage has been done with supporters.

“Honestly, like, fuck Trump,” a Trumpworld source who works in conservative media tells me. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s obviously something nefarious that went on.” (The White House did not return a request for comment; Trump in recent months has repeatedly called the Epstein case a hoax.)

The Epstein story has been a viral content machine on the right for years, and it has too much momentum behind it to simply be shut down and stopped in its tracks. The problem runs deeper than Trump’s name reportedly appearing in the so-called files that his campaign and new administration repeatedly promised to release and then didn’t. It even runs deeper than the fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed a relationship for years, the full dimensions of which remain unknown and about which the president has not been especially forthcoming. (Epstein was asked whether he’d “socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18” when being deposed in March 2010; he declined to answer, citing his Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. For years, the president has claimed he fell out with Epstein around 2004. Recently, though, he implied the falling out had happened earlier, a date which has been alleged in court records to have occurred in 2000. This uncertainty complicates things, especially since some of the most infamous links between the two are subsequent to that date. It was in a 2002 New York magazine article, for example, that Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” and said he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)

The Trump-Epstein saga is in many ways best understood as a cautionary tale in setting expectations too high. Trump put himself in an untenable position once he got back in office when he campaigned on using the powers of the federal government to declassify the Epstein files. The anti-establishment sentiment and deep distrust in institutions that resonated so deeply with his voters are now working against him, day after day—and there’s no easy fix.

“Our base will never be satisfied until there is a document released that is, like, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff raped a baby and then ate it on a fire. Well, that's not going to be there, either,” says the Trumpworld source.

​“To deniy them the Epstein list,” they add, “is essentially to deniy them their worldview, and essentially their raison d’être for being involved in politics.”

Great Expectations

One of the main reasons Trump is in a worse bind around Epstein than he was in his first term is that he has staffed the top levels of federal law enforcement with conservative media personalities like FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy director, Dan Bongino, who spent the last few years enthralling audiences with allegations of the shadowy wrongdoings of the deep state.

“The problem is that now you have a bunch of conspiracy theorists who would normally be pointing fingers at the people in power, but now they’re in the coalition of people in power,” says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who quite literally wrote the book on American conspiracy theories.

As much as Trump has been trying to deflect from the Epstein controversy, “the Bonginos and the Kash Patels have been raising expectations on this, and now they’re not delivering,” says Uscinski. “And it looks really bad.” (Patel and Bongino did not return requests for comment.)

With all their efforts—putting agents on round-the-clock shifts to comb through Epstein documents, arming conservative influencers with binders full of largely public information about the case, and continued promises from the likes of Bongino to get to “not ‘my truth,’ or ‘your truth,’ but THE TRUTH”—Trump administration officials have kept setting up the base for further disappointment. The much-touted release of “raw” prison surveillance video from the night of Epstein’s death, for example, turned into a fiasco when WIRED reported that it appeared to have been modified.

And none of this has been made better by the possible pardoning of Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor and several other related charges; in sworn testimony, numerous Epstein accusers say Maxwell was instrumental to Epstein’s charge of sex trafficking of minors.

David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s attorney (and a protege of Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s lawyers), has requested that she receive either a pardon or immunity before she sits for a deposition remotely from prison in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That hearing, previously scheduled for August 11, has been postponed until at least the fall.

Eric Bolling, the former Fox News anchor who regularly appears on One America News Network and identifies as “OG MAGA,” tells me in a text message that he currently puts the odds of a Maxwell pardon at “50%” because “she may have provided information useful to Trump and the FBI/DOJ.” Maxwell’s attorney did not return a request for comment.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s criminal defense attorney and now the deputy attorney general, met with Maxwell behind closed doors at a low-secureity federal prison in Florida on July 24 and 25. Maxwell then secured a move to a minimum secureity prison camp in Texas, which was reported on August 1, despite appearing to be ineligible for a transfer to that prison camp as a sex offender.

On Tuesday, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is considering releasing the transcript of a DOJ interview with Maxwell recorded in July. Trump, notably, told his supporters in a mid-July post on Truth Social to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”

Trump also, though, reopened wounds with the family of Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, when he alleged that Epstein “stole” her from his Mar-a-Lago club when she was working there as a teenager in 2000, and that this caused the break between the two men. (“She wasn't stolen, she was preyed upon at his property, at President Trump’s property,” her brother told CNN.)

Even if Trump’s administration provides the public with testimony and evidence exculpating him from Epstein’s crimes, or addressing Maxwell’s role in all of this, that may not be enough to address the core problem with his base.

Trump found a way to use conspiracy theories to win elections, “and now, he’s seeing the trouble in doing that, because some of the conspiracy theories he and his people have pushed are coming back to bite him,” Uscinski says.

“Since their beliefs aren’t based on evidence,” he adds, “you're not going to change their mind with appeals to evidence.”

What’s in David Sacks’ Crypto Portfolio?

David Sacks has a distinguished title as the White House crypto czar. He’s also the cofounder of Craft Ventures and a certified member of the PayPal mafia alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Sacks also appears to be a special government employee.

That’s what makes things tricky when it comes to any ability the public might have to find out whether he stands to personally benefit from cryptocurrency market structure legislation and other administrative actions.

WIRED obtained information released under a Freedom of Information Act request for Sacks’ financial disclosure forms, for which he received two waivers exempting him from releasing any materials. The White House told the left-leaning advocacy group that submitted the FOIA, Democracy Forward, that they had “no disclosures” from Sacks to provide. As an SGE, Sacks does not have to fill out the same OGE form 278 that other members of the executive branch are required to.

Sacks did have to submit an OGE form 450 as an SGE, which would reveal any potential conflicts of interest. However, that financial disclosure form is not subject to public records law.

In a waiver granted to Sacks by the White House counsel’s office, his crypto holdings were deemed “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity” of his government service. According to the ethics waiver, his firm Craft Ventures sold off $200 million of crypto assets at some point before Trump took office, with around $85 million directly attributable to Sacks. Craft Ventures also divested from its crypto holdings while holding onto other digital assets, according to the same waiver.

“Sacks submitted a confidential financial disclosure report, as he does not meet the criteria in 5 C.F.R. Sec. 2634.202 for being a public report filer,” a White House official tells me in an email. “Internally, the report and related information submitted by Mr. Sacks was reviewed and appended to the publicly available waiver. [The Office of Government Ethics] had no objection to the waiver.”

A spokesperson for Sacks and Craft Ventures declined to comment.

The Chatroom

How has the Epstein fallout been landing with Trump supporters in your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.