Republican Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene says President Donald Trump is risking losing the support of his MAGA base if he does not follow through on his word to release the Epstein files.
In an X post on Monday, Greene, a regular proponent of Trump, without mentioning the president by name, warned that if he did not release the files, his loyal supporters would turn on him.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) attends U.S. President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC.
Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images
“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Taylor Greene wrote.
“If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back,” she continued.
“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else,” she added.
Her message comes weeks after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi walked back her promise to deliver documents she said the administration had, detailing the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein‘s criminal activity, including a supposed list of wealthy, high-profile clients.
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It also comes on the heels of growing calls from powerful Republicans — including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, former vice-president Mike Pence, FBI head Kash Patel and its deputy, Daniel Bongino — to release the files.
Trump, however, has been defiant, describing supporters hung up on the Epstein files as “weaklings” who were helping Democrats. “I don’t want their support anymore!” he said in a social media post.
Last Thursday, the president found himself entangled in a new problem when The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) shared never-before-seen details of a sexually suggestive note — which the outlet says included a hand-drawn sketch of a naked woman seemingly drawn by the future president — Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein, his then friend, as part of a 50th birthday gift organized by the former financier’s aide at the time, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump denied the note was his creation and, according to the WSJ, said the letter was “a fake thing.”
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he added. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
The WSJ described the drawing as including “a pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts,” with the president’s signature written in a “squiggly” font below her waist and a final line that reads: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
The day’s revelation — coupled with frustration from Trump-allied lawmakers on Capitol Hill — pushed Trump to abruptly reverse course and direct Bondi to try to make some of the documents in the case public.
Bondi said she would seek court permission Friday to release grand jury information, but it would require a judge’s approval, and she and Trump were silent on the additional evidence collected by federal law enforcement in the sprawling investigation that Bondi last week announced she would not release.
On Tuesday, in what activist Al Sharpton says is a distraction tactic from “the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility,” the president released 240,000 previously sealed FBI documents detailing its extensive surveillance of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.
— With files from The Associated Press
