It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for Donald Trump to be caught in the Epstein dragnet than at the tail end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with food benefits rattled, “affordability” on everyone’s minds, and his own voters starting to wonder if the guy in the red tie is actually on their side.

On the same day Trump finally signed a bill to reopen the government after 43 days of chaos, a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans dropped a tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails that punches holes straight through the president’s carefully curated story about a distant, long-ago acquaintance, with Epstein alleging Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims.

While the messages don’t show criminal conduct by Trump, they landed at a moment when Americans are already furious with his handling of Epstein’s files, the shutdown, and the basic question of whether their government works for the powerful or for everyone else. Together, they form a pincer around a president who keeps promising transparency and law and order, then flinching the second those promises threaten him personally.

“The Dog That Hasn’t Barked”

The new emails came from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena and were released by the House Oversight Committee.

In one April 2011 exchange, Epstein tells Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, that “the dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” adding that a trafficking victim “spent hours at my house with him” yet “he has never once been mentioned.” Maxwell replies that she has “been thinking about that.”

In another email, from January 2019, Epstein writes to author Michael Wolff about Mar-a-Lago: “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

A third exchange from December 2015 shows Wolff and Epstein gaming out how Trump should respond to questions from CNN about their relationship, with Wolff advising Epstein to “let him hang himself” if Trump “says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house” because that would give Epstein “PR and political currency” over him.

The emails cut against Trump’s own narrative that he barely knew Epstein.

The more than 23,000 documents do not contain the storied “client list” the internet — and Trump’s own supporters — have been clamoring for, and none of the publicly released civil case records accuse Trump. But the emails do something almost as politically toxic: They cut against Trump’s own narrative that he barely knew Epstein, and that he had no meaningful insight into what Epstein had done.

The White House is already calling the messages a “fake narrative” stitched together by partisan Democrats and pointing out that key accuser Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, repeatedly said she never saw Trump engage in wrongdoing. (Trump himself has also repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein’s crimes.) Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of selectively redacting her name to make the emails look worse. But the specific denials aren’t the point anymore; the point is that the president now looks like he has something to hide about his role in a story where many Americans are already inclined to believe there was a cover-up.

America Wants the Files

Public opinion on this issue is not subtle. Polling in early October found that about

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