Trump suddenly wants the Epstein files released. Here’s what’s really happening:

After years of brushing off questions about Jeffrey Epstein, even calling the entire scandal a “boring” distraction, US President Donald Trump has flipped. And loudly.

“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” Trump posted late Sunday on Truth Social, declaring the long-running saga a “Democrat Hoax” engineered by “Radical Left Lunatics”.

The politics behind this reversal are far less mysterious than the files he now says he wants unsealed.

For weeks, Republicans have been peeling away from Trump on the Epstein Transparency Act, a bipartisan push to force the Department of Justice to release all remaining materials within 30 days. Democrats and a cluster of Republicans have already hit the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote. Some Republicans estimate as many as 100 could support it.

This is the moment Trump realised he was about to be left standing alone. And he hates the optics of isolation more than he fears the files.

His about-face also lands amid a very public crack in his political base, the kind he usually keeps behind closed doors. At the centre of it: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a frontline loyalist.

“The American people deserve full transparency into who was involved in these horrific acts,” Greene wrote on X, openly backing the release bill.

Trump’s reaction was volcanic. He now calls her a “traitor” and “ranting Lunatic” and has threatened to endorse a challenger against her. Greene says the split is over the Epstein files. Trump won’t admit it, but the timing is unmistakable.

What pulled these fault lines into the open were newly published emails that revived questions about Trump’s past friendship with Epstein. One 2019 message from Epstein to a journalist claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Another, sent in 2011, said Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s home with a trafficking victim. The White House insists this is selective, politically orchestrated material meant to “damage the president.”

But inside the Republican Party, the mood has shifted. Even loyalists have grown wary of appearing to protect anything connected to Epstein, whose network touched some of the most powerful figures across global politics and business.

Trump, who shared a 15-year friendship with Epstein, denies everything, wrongdoing, knowledge, relevance. He has said repeatedly that he “did not understand why the Epstein case would be of interest to anybody.”

Yet in July, as criticism from his own supporters mounted, he lashed out:

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax … My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit’ … after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.”

That’s what makes his new position so striking. The president who once said the Epstein saga was “sordid, but boring” now wants to lead the charge for transparency.

Not because he became a transparency champion overnight, but because he no longer controls the pace of the story.