With GOP Rep. Nancy Mace’s embarrassing fifth-place finish in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary Tuesday, three of the four House Republicans who forced the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files will soon no longer hold elected office.

And their demise has happened much faster than that of other Trump apostates in the GOP — namely the vast majority of lawmakers who had backed his impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s primary loss last month meant that, of the 17 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the House (10) or convict him in the Senate (7) in 2021, a maximum of three will remain in Congress next year.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress earlier this year after repeatedly breaking with Trump on Epstein and other issues. And Trump last month marshalled a furious – and ultimately successful – primary campaign to oust Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a leader of the discharge petition.

Trump has also targeted the fourth signer of the petition, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert — especially when she campaigned for Massie — but he did so too late for a primary challenger to file. Boebert is unopposed in her primary and expected to win the general election in a solidly Republican district.

It’s too simple to reduce Mace, Greene and Massie’s loss of power to the Epstein files. Both Greene and Massie were bucking Trump on plenty of other things, too. And Mace’s incessant political attention-seeking and often-bizarre behavior might well have alienated primary voters as much as the Epstein saga.

She’s currently taking just 12% of the vote, and she even finished a distant third in her home area, Charleston County.

But Mace has made clear she thinks the Epstein episode cost her — including by spurring Trump to endorse Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who wound up qualifying for the runoff.

After Trump endorsed Evette late last month, Mace said: “If sacrificing my values is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it.”

And Mace returned to the theme on Tuesday night, while conceding her loss.

“I voted to release the Epstein files and lost some support for that,” she said. “As a survivor, I chose to stand on principle and stand against the Epstein cover-up. I chose to stand against child rapists.”

Mace soon added: “And apparently, I chose wrong if the goal was winning an election.”

The quick exits of most of the Epstein Four are, in a way, pretty remarkable. When the files issue first began percolating, it was in large part because of right-wing Trump supporters — and often Trump-aligned influencers.

The likes of now-FBI Director Kash Patel and his former No. 2, podcaster Dan Bongino, repeatedly promoted the idea that there was a scandal to uncover. Vice President JD Vance also promoted such theories.

But as 2025 wore on, it became clear Trump — who was once close with Epstein and whose name wound up appearing frequently in the files — was not at all keen on the transparency that his administration had promised. The New York Times on Wednesday published a detailed account from reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recounting how the administration struggled to reconcile Trump’s reluctance with the base’s conspiratorial fervor. (Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein or any allegation of sexual misconduct.)

But as time wore on, the base hued closer to Trump’s nothing-to-see-here posture. MAGA voters didn’t fully adopt that posture, mind you. But they did seem to stop caring so much about the whole thing.

And despite the government’s slow disclosures and Trump’s efforts to prevent them, base voters increasingly signaled in polls that they were satisfied with the administration’s handling of the situation.

That doesn’t mean voters went to the polls in South Carolina and Kentucky just to punish Mace and Massie for forcing the disclosure of the files. But their actions surely put a target on their backs.

And their defeat — like that of the impeachment supporters, the Indiana state senators who bucked Trump on redistricting and Texas Sen. John Cornyn — sends a message: Republicans buck Trump at the peril of their career. The easiest course for them is often to just do what the president wants.

And that apparently even includes when Republicans are following through on something the base was once quite keen on.

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