It's all totally out in the open that this is just a power grab. Trump is just trying to maneuver his people to the right thing.
From the begining of the whole "Pizzagate" fiasco, the right wing has spun themselves up into a fury over Democrats being an evil satanic cult that abused children without any evidence, because they don't need evidence, because the truth never really mattered. To the average Trump supporter, the Epstein list represented an excuse to do the thing they really want to do, which is smash the political opposition and create a single party state.
The Epstein list was always just an amorphous unfalsifiable ace-in-the-hole for Republicans who wanted to find a reason to justify the eventual coup. If you can convince yourself that the opposition party is engaged in the regular and systematic abuse of children, you can justify doing anything to anyone: arrest them, jail them, prevent them from running for office. You can effectively ban the Democratic Party and throw the next election to Trump or his puppet without needing to actually campaign. It's a playbook people like Putin have used very effectively.
And this is obvious if you look at all those tweets we're seeing now right wingers made back in 2024 about how excited they were to release "the list." They are never excited for justice or closure for victims. They are excited because they have been promised that all their least favorite Democrats were on the list. Releasing the list would mark the start of the coup they are really waiting for, giving them a government-approved list of enemies and letting them lose to start demanding that people be jailed/killed.
In that sense, I don't think it really matters whether Trump was an Epstein client or who else is on the list. Miller and Trump were going to edit the list however they wanted and release it at the right time to make sure they hurt their opponents the most. That was the plan. But now the Dems they really need to sabotage (AoC, Pritzker, Walz, Buttigeig, Newsom, Mamdani etc.) don't have any ties to the thing and it wouldn't be credible to release a list with them on it, and throwing the mainline Dems out of a proverbial helicopter would probably only help the people who want to reform the Democratic Party rebuild.
What's happening on MAGA world right now is that Trump and Miller are signaling that they need more time to organize the coup they want and that the Epstein list isn't going to be their night of broken glass after all, and Trump supporters are complaining that they don't get to Hang Mike Pence right now, or whatever the 2025 equivalent is. Trump will get his people to move on from Epstein because they never really cared in the first place.
I suspect everyone is just waiting for some new conspiracy theory to get cooked up that will justify the continued calls for the Democrats to be jailed for no particular reason. The Epstein list was like the sixth or seventh theory Republicans had about some secret crime or coverup that would allow them to justifiably wipe out their competition. They will make another one.
