Jonathan Chait: “Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.”

“Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is… not that…”

“Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said the Trump administration should “release the damn” Jeffrey Epstein files as the best way to put the whole issue in the rear view, Axios reports.

Said Tillis: “It makes no sense to me. Either it’s a nothing burger… or it’s something really disturbing, and that’s actually even a more compelling reason to release it.”

“President Donald Trump is angry. His team is exasperated. The Republican-controlled House is in near rebellion,” Politico reports.

“Trump and his closest allies thought they’d spend the summer taking a well-earned victory lap, having coaxed Congress into passing the megabill, bullied foreign governments into a slew of new trade arrangements, convinced NATO allies to spend billions more on collective defense and pressed world leaders to bow to various other demands from Doha to The Hague.”

“Instead, questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, who was found dead in his jail cell by suicide nearly six years ago, are overshadowing almost everything else.”

Said one person close to the White House: “POTUS is clearly furious. It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

Charlie Warzel: “Summer weekends in America are good for lots of things: baseball games, cookouts, farmers’ markets, sipping a bev next to a lake. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump: crashing out on social media in hopes of distracting the nation from nonstop coverage of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Trump is an inveterate poster, known for his erratic style and late-night tirades. But over the weekend, as the world refused to move on from his administration’s bizarre handling of the Epstein files—which has led segments of his base to completely melt down—Trump went on a posting spree that was alarming, even by his own standards.”

Fast Company: “What happens when you spend decades seeding salacious stories about evil lurking in the halls of power, demanding evidence to prove basic truths, and questioning the veracity of that evidence once it’s presented?”

“Donald Trump is finding out.”

“Over the last week, the president has been trying to fight his way out of a web of his own creation, as some of his truest followers in MAGA world call for the full release of the government’s investigative files concerning convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The outcry from Trump acolytes comes after the Department of Justice published a two-page memo earlier this month, stating that Epstein’s supposed “client list,” which Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said was on her desk, didn’t actually exist.”

A new YouGov poll finds President Trump’s net approval with young people at -40, down from roughly even at the start of his term.

“President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation,” Axios reports.

“Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.”

“Trump appears to be losing by winning. The more he does (including issues beyond his legislative wins), the more the general public, especially independents, shrug — or recoil.”

 “This paradox is unfolding in what could be the very best chapter of his presidency, before tariffs push prices higher or midterms pose risks to his GOP majorities. And it’s being aggravated by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which has exposed rare cracks in Trump’s decade-old MAGA movement.”