On Tuesday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) lost the Republican primary for governor in South Carolina. Mace lost partially because President Donald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette.
Almost immediately, Mace said she likely lost Trump’s endorsement because she had joined the bipartisan discharge petition drafted by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to force a vote to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
This came even though during the process Mace explicitly told The Independent, “No one has threatened me” and that “the president hasn’t threatened me, and the president didn’t ask me to get off the discharge petition.”
The loss means Mace — the moderate-turned-MAGA Republican who took to harassing Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first openly transgender member of Congress — will not be returning to Washington.
Mace’s loss makes her the third House Republican to lose their primary after challenging Trump on Epstein. Massie lost his last month. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned months ago after a public break with Trump on Epstein.
open image in galleryAnd Trump is already targeting Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) for supporting Massie, even though the filing deadline to challenge her already passed.
“The retribution series continues,” Massie told The Independent on Wednesday “The good thing is those three women helped me get a law passed. Not a subpoena, not a resolution. The president signed it.”
Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on tamping down the internal party revolt on Epstein. And on Wednesday, an excerpt of The New York Times’s Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman‘s new book allegedly revealed just how much time.
The excerpt reports that Trump’s close advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, huddled in the Situation Room to figure out how to handle Epstein with then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel joining by speakerphone.
open image in galleryThe new Swan-Haberman excerpt reported that the Trump administration viewed this as a major public relations crisis, with Vance even reportedly suggesting that Tucker Carlson, the right-wing media provocateur, interview Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
But despite Trump’s retribution politically there is little sign that the Epstein story is going away anytime soon. If anything, as then-Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino said according to the book excerpt, it’s become Trump’s Iran-Contra. It might be worse than that.
The Department of Justice and FBI’s two-page memo that said that no “client list” existed for the convicted sex offender — who died by suicide while in jail awaiting trial. Just this week, a pop-up facility in DC called the Donald J. Trump and Epstein Memorial Reading Room opened.
The Epstein saga, meanwhile, ultimately played a role in the ouster of Bondi as attorney general. That led to Trump making Blanche, also the president’s former personal attorney, his acting attorney general and nominating Blanche to be the new top official at the Department of Justice.
Blanche’s confirmation hearings will begin next month. Expect Blanche to be grilled about it, especially given that he’s said that no more Epstein files will be released.
Democrats have gone all-in on talking about Epstein ahead of the 2026 midterms. Khanna, a member of the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus, has popularized the term “Epstein class,” and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has taken the term up in his re-election campaign.
This week, newly elected Demopcratic nominee for Maine Sen. Susan Coillins’ seat, Graham Platner, who faces numerous questions about his past comments about sexual abuse, ran an ad saying “we will take back our government from the Epstein class.”
And in Ohio, former U.S. senator Sherrod Brown is running an ad against Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), hitting him for receiving money from associates of Epstein.
And there’s more where that will come from. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told reporters on Thursday that if Democrats take back the House, they will focus on Epstein.
“I think that it’s the single most bipartisan issue in the country,” Garcia said. “So I think we’re going to talk about it a lot.”
Trump might not even need to wait that long. Mace and Massie will be in Congress until the end of the year and can continue to make noise about it.
And when The Independent asked Massie if he would follow through with naming accomplices of Epstein’s on the floor, he said “Stay Tuned. We still got seven months.”