If Joe Rogan is any indication, February 2026 may go down as the month that the Epstein files saga cemented itself as a lasting political liability for President Donald Trump and Republicans. The podcaster has spent the last week discussing the disjointed release of files by the Department of Justice, analyzing emails and redactions, and concluding that a myriad of conspiracies might actually be true.
And what is he saying? That the slow-walked and highly censored presentation of information by the Trump administration is “the gaslightiest gaslighting shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” that “none of this is good for this administration,” and that “this is not a hoax…if you’re not protecting victims…then who are you protecting?”
Rogan is representative of a large swath of voters who delivered Trump his 2024 victory: distrustful, low-propensity, and anti-system voters. And what he and other spokespeople for this suspicious segment of America — Tim Dillon, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz — are saying matters: it suggests that these anti-system voters, who were once thought to be a permanent part of the new GOP coalition, are nothing of the sort.
Those voters tend to skew politically moderate, independent, and, perhaps most importantly, young. They don’t tend to follow the news or know too much about Trump or politics. They get informed through nontraditional avenues like podcasts and social media, and aren’t wed to a political party or identity.
In 2024, all of this created an opportunity for the Trump campaign — to promise to release the so-called Epstein files.
But what these Americans are hearing and thinking now is very different. They feel like they are being lied to again, being gaslit, and seeing another cover-up happen in real time.
This administration is also doing itself no favors: Attorney General Pam Bondi’s House testimony this week only dug that hole deeper, as she redirected toward the stock market, refused to acknowledge Epstein survivors sitting behind her, and accused lawmakers of having “Trump derangement syndrome” for deigning to ask questions.
What data and research suggest about the effect of the Epstein files
There’s robust evidence over the last few months that the Trump administration’s slow-walking of the Epstein files is breaking through to voters. Researchers who track opinion among these lower-propensity, anti-system voters have found a few notable trends.
In public opinion research from Navigator, a Democratic-aligned firm, nearly three-quarters of Americans have heard “a lot” or “some” about the Trump administration’s handling of the files — more than the share who were aware of Trump’s reaction to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE agents.
Particularly notable are the levels of awareness among independent and passive news consumers: about 6 in 10 of these Americans have heard about this — more than the ICE killings, and the expiration of ACA tax credits that led to last fall’s government shutdown, but less than those aware of Trump’s tariffs.
At the same time, more than half of Americans in these surveys say they are concerned by the administration’s handling of the files, including about half of independents and passive news consumers.
These findings from January build on previous reports: Navigator found that 55 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files in December, when the first new batch were released, and majorities of independents and passive news consumers similarly disapproved back then.
And in Navigator’s focus groups with these voters in January, the same kind of sentiment you hear from these podcasters jumps out:
“I think the whole Epstein debacle, I think that should have been out already months and months ago,” one Republican man from Pennsylvania who regrets his vote for Trump told moderators.
Another regretful Trump voter, a Republican man from Michigan, echoed that sense of conspiracy: “The Epstein Files. Yeah, what a letdown. […] And I think that one really turned me against [Trump] and made me see exactly what was going on. There’s obviously a coverup. There’s obviously something that somebody doesn’t… Or else they would release it.”
This is an especially big issue among young men. Researchers from Third Way, the moderate Democratic think-tank, have found particularly notable disagreement among young Republican men with how Trump is handling the issue. In their latest report of how young men view Trump, they found that of the nine actions they polled, Trump’s opposition to the full release of the Epstein files was the second most unpopular — some 63 percent of young men found it “very concerning.”
Some 41 percent of young Republican men found the issue off-putting — their highest area of disagreement with Trump’s position.
“The Epstein files are breaking through the deluge of news…and this issue isn’t going anywhere,” Melissa Toufanian, Navigator’s managing director, told me. “For younger voters especially, this doesn’t feel like a typical partisan political fight. It’s reinforcing what they already believe, that powerful people don’t play by the same rules and can evade accountability. People aren’t really shocked, but they are frustrated that the system feels broken and isn’t working for people like them.”
And the issue may only get bigger. The entire alternative media ecosystem has only dedicated more time and effort over the last few weeks discussing the files and spawning new conspiracy theories about why so many names have been redacted.
I asked Charlie Sabgir, the director of the Young Men Research Project, to dig into how the top 50 podcasts among young men have been discussing the files since the start of this month. He found that this topic is breaking through in all categories of this medium: not just explicitly political shows, but comedy and entertainment, true crime, sports, and music and culture shows too.
While blame isn’t exclusively reserved for Trump and Republicans, they tend to get lumped into the category of gaslighting “elites” now — and the mood is particularly sour that accountability will ever be achieved. As the hosts of Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast put it on Wednesday, “What does Trump have to lose? Everyone thinks he’s already implicated.”
