Trump has painted himself into a corner over this Epstein Stuff.

As everyone knows, he made a big deal – during the campaign – about it, promising that he would get to the bottom of it and let the public know all about it, if he got re-elected. Then he got re-elected and all of a sudden, the former fervor to spill the details began to wane, until it disappeared altogether. It was just a "hoax," the re-elected president snapped. One confected by Democrats – which is an interesting assertion given that so many prominent Democrats, including Bill Clinton have been linked to Epstein in ways that look pretty damning.

Why would Democrats push a "hoax" that made many of their leading avatars look really bad?

A better question, perhaps, is: Why would Trump turn so aggressively against spilling the entire (unredacted) contents in the "files" held by the government?

A hypothesis that perhaps makes some sense is that Trump believed he could make a campaign issue of the Epstein Stuff and that people would forget all about it after the campaign. Like they did his "lock her up" promises – if anyone remembers those.

This is perhaps the key to understanding Trump's art of the deal. He is a dog-whistler par excellence. He says what he knows his audience wants to hear – and then does nothing (or even the opposite, as for example his sudden priapism for regime-changing).

Maybe he said what he thought people – especially his people – wanted to hear about the Epstein Stuff because those people had been hearing a great deal about it for several years prior to the last election.

They understandably wanted to know whether it was true that high-placed government officials were not just banging very young women (some of whom may have been adolescent girls) but also whether they were being blackmailed for having done such. The latter is even more important than the former because while the former is atrocious – if it is true that rich old men were banging very young women procured for them by Epstein and that perhaps some of these were adolescent girls being trafficked by him – the blackmailing part is much worse. If that is true, it means the blackmailers had operative control over high-placed government officials, which means those blackmailers would have enjoyed control over the federal government and its various appendages.