Some of the biggest conservative influencers on social media were on hand to receive what might have been the most discussed binders in American politics since Mitt Romney‘s much more benign “binders full of women”: Rogan O’Handley (better known as DC Draino), Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, and Chaya Raichik (also known as LibsofTikTok).

O’Handley wrote on social media that the group had met with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel. “This is the most transparent administration in American history,” O’Handley added. “The best part? This is just the start.” After their meeting, the exultant influencers were photographed holding aloft binders reading, “The Epstein Files: Phase I.”

Since Epstein was found dead in his New York prison cell while awaiting sex trafficking charges in 2019, during Trump’s first term, conspiracy theories have swirled. The optics of this extremely wealthy man with rich and powerful friends who had become a symbol of elite depravity dying in custody were bad, to say the least. (Bill Barr, who was attorney general at the time, was once asked what his reaction was when he first learned of Epstein’s death. He replied, “Oh, s***.”) There was widespread skepticism in conservative and more broadly anti-establishment circles that Epstein had committed suicide. 

Podcasters and influencers vowed to get to the bottom of what seemed like the ultimate manifestation of deep-state perfidy, wrapped in all the drama of the true crime genre. They were now several binders closer to blowing the lid off the whole thing, some believed at the time. “It’s a new administration, and everything is going to come out to the public,” Bondi said earlier this year.

Not everyone was so happy, even then. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), chairwoman of the then-brand-new House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, asked — on X, of course — why lawmakers like herself hadn’t seen the files first. “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment,” she posted, citing a New York Post report she said described the binders’ contents as “simply … Epstein’s phonebook.”

Trump-aligned influencers who were not at the White House also spoke out about the documents.

“I don’t need the Epstein files to be curated to me through a bunch of pick-me conservative influencers,” Laura Loomer protested. “I can read myself. Release the files or stop pretending like you are going to release them. Enough with the theatrics. This is pathetic.”

Then, on July 7, the Justice Department said in a publicly released memo that Epstein kept no specific list of high-profile clients to whom he trafficked underage girls. The memo also reiterated that Epstein killed himself, adding, “This conclusion is consistent with previous findings, including the August 19, 2019 autopsy findings of the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the November 2019 position of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in connection with the investigation of federal correctional officers responsible for guarding Epstein, and the June 2023 conclusions of DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.”

Whatever its merits, the memo convinced few of the internet sleuths who had been on the case. Predictably, many of those who had been paraded outside the White House to hold up their Epstein binders felt disappointed and probably played. “Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been,” Posobiec posted. “And it didn’t have to be.”

While most of the ire was directed at Bondi and her subordinates for inexplicably playing up the information they were going to make publicly available, a few directed their criticism higher up the food chain. “Trump is massively misreading his base on this one,” Wheeler wrote on X. “It could cost him the midterms. People CARE about Epstein.” (There has been some subsequent wiggle room about whether this is the administration’s final answer on Epstein.)

Sex trafficking victims deserve justice, perpetrators and enablers accountability, and voters transparency, even if some of the online fascination with Epstein has degenerated into a lurid, click-generating spectacle. But the point Wheeler raises here is worth pondering on its own: How politically salient is Epstein, and how influential are the influencers? Is this something that animates grassroots MAGA supporters, or is this a purely online phenomenon? 

Trump largely ignored these commentators when he ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last month. He successfully pushed his one “big, beautiful” megabill largely without regard to the online chatter. But it’s also true that internet communities helped him return to the White House and that then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s refusal to sit down with Joe Rogan is now regarded as one of the 2024 campaign’s biggest blunders.

The Democratic establishment strongly believed that former President Joe Biden evicted Trump from the White House in 2020 in large part by ignoring the Very Online Left. And that was during the height of progressive fervor about the pandemic and Black Lives Matter that Democrats have spent the past five years trying to put in the rearview mirror.

“There is a conversation that’s going on on Twitter that they don’t care about,” a Democratic strategist memorably told Politico in June 2020. “They won the primary by ignoring all of that. The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional Left that has taken over places like the New York Times. You can be against chokeholds and not believe in white fragility. You can be for reforming police departments and don’t necessarily have to believe that the United States is irredeemably racist.”

Ryan Lizza, Laura Barron-Lopez, and Holly Otterbein wrote in the outlet, “The Biden campaign’s unspoken primary slogan could have been, ‘Twitter isn’t real life.’”

But in 2022, the tech billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X. He sought to combat what was widely viewed as the platform’s suppression of conservative speech and important news that might have boosted Trump’s 2020 campaign, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, which had been banned in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and made the website more Trump-friendly.

It might still have been true that the website formerly known as Twitter wasn’t real life. But there is no question that these moves had a political impact in the real world. 

A June 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 31% of X users believed the site favored conservative views (this opinion was held by 55% of Democrats using the platform who were polled) compared to only 5% who thought it promoted liberalism more. Thirty-eight percent said the site supported both sides equally.

In 2024, this became part of a broader strategy by the Trump campaign to appear in spaces dominated by people who, to paraphrase Timothy Leary’s slogan for an earlier counterculture, turned off, tuned out, and dropped out from the legacy media. These were often young men disillusioned with conventional politics and distrustful of institutions. Musk and conservative activist Charlie Kirk wanted to counter the sprawling Democratic get-out-the-vote field apparatus by mobilizing low-propensity voters.

Trump had always been entrepreneurial about new media, though he often credited his youngest son, Barron, for knowing the best podcasts. Trump had acquired millions of Twitter followers in its pre-Musk days. His account was critical to building his political, as opposed to business and reality TV, brand at a time when former President Barack Obama and the Democrats were otherwise dominant in the medium. He had also been invited on television talk shows to comment on public affairs as far back as the 1980s, but those interviews were far less contentious before he entered politics as a candidate.

Podcasts brought back those friendlier interviews, which, in turn, gave people a glimpse of a more subdued and less combative Trump.

Trump is ready to turn the page on some of the subjects that most interest those interviewers.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” he said when a reporter asked about Epstein at a Cabinet meeting. “Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”

Trump added, “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, when we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”

Musk, who has been flirting with creating an America Party to compete with the GOP in the midterm elections and possibly beyond, is among those deeply invested in the Epstein files. He has criticized his former Trump administration colleagues for their handling of the Epstein files. At the height of his feud with Trump since stepping down from the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk claimed the president is named in those files.

Even if Epstein is a minor issue at best next year, the types of low-propensity voters Musk and Kirk have been credited with turning out in 2024 have always been a challenge in nonpresidential election years. There has also always been a question of how transferable Trump’s appeal to nontraditional voters is to more conventional Republicans in downballot races. Most of the GOP’s Senate candidates underperformed Trump even last year.

IT WON’T BE EASY FOR MUSK TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL THIRD PARTY 

Anything that further demoralizes these episodic, anti-establishment voters could matter at the margins. Or not.

MAGA isn’t the first political movement to grapple with the question of how online is too online. It won’t be the last.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.