Trump’s enemies just made this the Epstein election

On Monday, with just days to go before crucial elections that could lose Donald Trump’s party control of Congress, Democrats dropped a bombshell. It was a 53-page report describing in exhaustive detail Trump’s links to the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Titled: “The case against Donald Trump in the Epstein files”, the dossier was released by Democrats with just over a week until the US midterm elections. Shorts But the document also represents something else that should cause grave worry to the President: a warning shot that the Epstein story is about to get a lot worse for him. If Democrats retake the US House of Representatives as is expected, they have made clear that they intend to keep pressing Trump on his links to Epstein. They want to know about what the report calls the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) “desperate attempt to cover it up” by failing to release files about the two men. Control of the House will give Democrats the majority on powerful committees like the Oversight Committee, giving them subpoena power. In a statement to The i Paper, Representative Suhas Subramanyam, who sits on the committee, said they would absolutely target Trump and his administration. He said: “Unlike House Republicans, we will use the full subpoena power of Congress to get justice for the survivors and transparency for the American people.” His thoughts were echoed by Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, who told Bloomberg this week that Epstein was “going to be one of our top priorities”. Epstein is so toxic for the President that Democrats have done their best to make this election a referendum on the late financier as much as the cost of living and the Iran war. According to a recent analysis by CNN, a staggering 160 Epstein-related adverts have run in the 2026 midterm elections at a cost of $35 million (£26m), including in US Senate races. Back in the 2024 presidential election, just three Epstein-related adverts ran at a cost of $470,000 (£353,000), and they were all in local races. This time around, Ken Paxton, the troubled Republican Senate candidate in Texas, was accused by Democrats of an “Epstein-style deal to let a paeodphile walk free”. Trump with then-girlfriend and future wife, model Melania Knauss, Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2000 (Photo: Davidoff Studios/Getty Images) In Mississippi, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith has faced a brutal attack advert featuring a disillusioned Trump voter who is angry over her vote not to release the Epstein files. Even the family of the late Virginia Giuffre, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s accuser, appeared in an attack ad aimed at a Republican Representative in Colorado. In the commercial, Giuffre’s brother Sky Roberts said that Jeff Crank “covered up Epstein’s crimes to protect Donald Trump”. “He has no business being in Congress,” Roberts says. The Epstein story has created a new phrase that is haunting the President: the “Epstein Class”, a global elite he once railed against but which he is now seen as being part of by many voters who are tired of his corruption and failure to bring down grocery prices. The Democrats’ report – which the White House has strongly refuted – does not provide much new information about Trump and Epstein, who knew each other for more than a decade in the 90s and 2000s. It features new claims to the committee from one woman who had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1993. Beatrice Keul, a model and beauty pageant contestant, alleges that she was raped by Trump in a hotel suite in Manhattan when she was 24. The White House denied the allegations in the report, saying “none of these allegations are true” and that Trump had been “fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein”. It added in a statement: “This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements.” Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing related to the sex offender, saying that he fell out with Epstein. But it’s a striking compilation of stories which, when presented together, makes for uneasy reading for the President. There are pages of questions to which Democrats are likely to seek answers if they retake one of the chambers of Congress, such as why did the DoJ abruptly declare in July 2025 that nobody else would be charged over the Epstein case? Why was Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for trafficking children to Epstein, transferred to a low-security prison amid speculation Trump was going to pardon her? The report states: “These questions have a straightforward answer: the Trump administration took these actions because Donald Trump is personally implicated in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.” The DoJ could be “deliberately covering up further evidence that directly implicates Trump in Epstein’s crimes of sex trafficking and abuse of female minors”, the report suggests. Trump, who denies any wrongdoing, faces another potential embarrassment if Democrats succeed in passing a second version of the law that led to the release of more than three million Epstein files. Dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, the bill would force the DoJ to release the rest of the files so the public could see what, if anything, the President has been hiding. That will ensure the President’s final two years in office could be consumed by more speculation about his friendship with a dead paedophile. That may give Epstein’s survivors something they have sought for decades now: a proper sense of accountability. In a statement to The i Paper, Spencer Kuvin, a Florida lawyer who represents several Epstein survivors, said: “It is our hope that if the Democrats retake the House that they can work together with the Republicans who have continued to support the victims and change the Epstein Transparency Act. “Also, it is our hope that the Democrats continue to push for a full disclosure of information and prosecution of co-conspirators.”