United States President Donald Trump has long touted himself as a political outsider, someone who would expose the elites’ abuse of power and shift government focus from far-off conflicts to problems at home. Phrases like “drain the swamp” and “America first” have proved to be powerful rallying cries, sparking a whole cadre of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans. Halfway through his final term as president, though, Trump has backpedalled on many of those ideas, cosying up to the ultra-wealthy, sidelining investigations into convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and launching an ongoing war with Iran.
That about-face appears to be having a real impact on Republicans running in the US midterm elections in November, said Rina Shah, a geopolitical adviser and strategist and a former senior GOP congressional aide. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would declassify troves of files kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about Epstein and his global network of contacts. Trump’s future cabinet members, too, were enthusiastic about this, with Kash Patel, now head of the FBI, saying it was time to “put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are”.
Yet a few months after taking office, Trump began dragging his feet, sparking a backlash from influential MAGA figures. Trump began calling the entire issue a “hoax” and saying Republicans were being duped by Democrats into calling for an investigation into Epstein’s network. Congress did eventually force the release of the files, with help from a handful of Republicans who broke with Trump.
The Trump administration has released batches of the heavily redacted files, but has continued to withhold some. Meanwhile, all the Republican lawmakers who voted to mandate releases have paid a price for their insubordination, with three even losing their offices. US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene left her Georgia seat in January 2026, after publicly clashing with Trump over Epstein.
Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, lost her bid to become the party’s candidate in her home state after Trump refused to endorse her. Colorado’s Lauren Boebert barely won the primary in her own contest after angering Trump by supporting calls for transparency from Thomas Massie, another Republican bent on exposing what the files held. Massie, of Kentucky, also drew Trump’s ire, which likely cost him the primary.
Trump had long said he would be reducing foreign military involvement, breaking with the interventionist tendencies of other recent Republican presidents. Now he and his party face tough questions about the US-Israel war on Iran, which influential figures in the MAGA movement like political commentator Tucker Carlson have called a mistake, saying, “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.” Amongst disgruntled MAGA supporters, a narrative has emerged of Trump using the war to also distract from the Epstein issue.
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