When the Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee released a few emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence referencing President Donald Trump in November, they resumed a conversation that has not only proven particularly irksome to him personally, but they believe it threatens the viability of his second administration — and his legacy.

In one email addressed to his infamous accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein declared that the “dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.” In another one, to the glorified gossip columnist Michael Wolff, Epstein wrote: “[VICTIM] mara lago. [REDACTED]. trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.” And over the course of another exchange with Wolff, the former suggested that interest in the relationship between Trump and Epstein could prove useful to the latter.

“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff advised. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”

Subsequently, House Republicans struck back by releasing 20,000 pages of documents pertaining to the Epstein case — and by revealing that the redacted victim that Trump had “spent hours” with was none other than the late Virginia Giuffre, who said she didn’t “think Donald Trump participated in anything” in a sworn deposition.

Donald Trump and his then-girlfriend, Melania Knauss, pose with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Feb. 12, 2000. (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

That fat stack of paperwork included plenty of embarrassing dirt on the Left’s upper crust. Among the members of the dishonor roll were Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI), who was texting Epstein for advice on how to question former Trump henchman Michael Cohen; Larry Summers, the former Clinton and Obama administration official who regrettably sought counsel from Epstein on how to seduce and cheat on his wife with a younger woman; former New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr., who was revealed to have tipped Epstein off about another journalist working on a book about him; and Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel for Obama who once described herself as the world famous pedophile’s lawyer.

But it also included still more references to Trump.

“There’s an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him. Interested?” Wolff wrote to Epstein on the eve of the 2016 presidential election.

“I know how dirty donald is,” Epstein told Ruemmler in 2018, his phrasing seemingly designed in a lab to induce headaches for Trump later.

In truth, though, this latest series of developments has been less news — fresh, pertinent information coming to light — than it has been yet another outbreak of the same conflict that’s dominated American politics every day since Trump descended his golden escalator to enter the arena more than a decade ago: the fight over his character.

It has long been known that Trump and Epstein were once friends. A 2002 New York magazine profile of the latter infamously quoted Trump as declaring that he’d “known Jeff for fifteen years” and asserting that he was a “terrific guy.”

Epstein survivors attend a press conference announcing the Epstein Files Transparency Act at the Capitol on Sept. 3 in Washington. (Graeme Jennings/Washington Examiner)

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life,” added the future president. For the uninitiated, that’s called foreshadowing.

It’s also long been known that Trump and Epstein had a falling out. According to a 2019 Washington Post deep dive, their friendship ended after the pair faced off against each other in a 2004 bidding war for a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump tells his own version of events, in which he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for “taking people” — young women, he confirmed after being asked — “from the spa.”

What’s most notable about these known facts about the Trump-Epstein relationship is not only that they were known prior to this latest multinews cycle uproar over it, but that none of what has been revealed in recent weeks contradicts, or even clarifies, what was already known.

And for both the Left and the Right, that’s the rub of it.

Democrats badly want to believe that the release of Epstein’s correspondence is a necessary step on the road toward Trump’s final defeat in the form of a resignation letter or conviction in the Senate, that at long last, their tireless efforts to take down their archnemesis — indeed, to their mind the chief antagonist of the millennium — will pay off.

They’ve been teased by the oh-so-tantalizing prospect before. There were his campaign trail spats with a federal judge of Hispanic descent, a Gold Star family, and forerunner John McCain. There was Access Hollywood and Charlottesville, Virginia; Helsinki and the 2019 impeachment. There was COVID-19, his electoral defeat in 2020, the destructive tantrum he threw after it, and yet another impeachment. Four criminal indictments, one conviction, and an initially successful civil lawsuit that seemed poised to break his beloved company. Still, he stands. And still, Democrats labor under the misapprehension that one day, they will vanquish him in some gratifying final confrontation.

This most desperate desire is a function of their own lofty self-conception as much as it is their low opinion of Trump. It is every professional Democrat’s ironclad belief that they are soldiers in the army of the right side of history, noble warriors whose mission is not only righteous, but the only thing standing between America and Nazi-esque fascism.

Every hero needs their moments of triumph, and Democrats haven’t had one that fulfilled them since Barack Obama won his first term as president 17 years ago.

Still, the relationship between Trump and Epstein continues to vex both the former and his followers and will continue to do so for as long as the drip, drip, drip of stories about the pair continues to trickle. And make no mistake, the trickle will continue now that the president has been compelled to sign a bill ordering the Justice Department to release every unclassified document pertaining to the Epstein case that it has.

Trump’s friendship with Epstein during his former life may not be the nail in the president’s coffin the way Democrats still imagined it might, but it is a sobering reminder of just who it is that Republicans have gleefully handed the executive branch over to twice now.

Conservatives who once waxed poetic about the sanctity of American institutions look the other way as Trump violates and co-opts them for his own personal, petty ends.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been enlisted to sell the public on a whole host of far-fetched claims about Trump’s enemies, including a supposedly horse tranquilizer-addled Hillary Clinton and possibly “treasonous” Obama.

At the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi has been dutifully carrying out the orders Trump gave to her in a message meant for her eyes only that he accidentally posted on Truth Social in mid-September.

“Nothing is being done,” Trump complained. “What about [former FBI Director James] Comey, [Sen.] Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, [New York Attorney General Letitia James]??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot. We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”

Before Thanksgiving, “really good lawyer” Lindsey Halligan secured indictments against both Comey and James on questionable grounds — only to see them both thrown out after a judge ruled that Halligan was improperly appointed to her post. Meanwhile, the DOJ has launched an investigation into Schiff for mortgage fraud, as well as a review of its own pardon attorney, Ed Martin, and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte over how they’ve tried to make Trump’s revenge dreams come true.

And from his perch at the Pentagon, War Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired Navy captain, over an admittedly ill-considered video he issued alongside other veterans of the military and intelligence community warning their successors not to follow illegal orders.

But don’t think for a second that Trump would leave all of the dirty work to his lieutenants. In a shocking series of posts reacting to the video featuring Kelly and five more of his Democratic colleagues in Congress, Trump suggested that “each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” before eventually working himself up to declare that they were guilty of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Such is his character, the same, relentlessly self-serving ethos that has been readily apparent for the entirety of his political career — and for many years before that, including those during which he counted Epstein as a close friend. Republicans have either just denied this truth entirely or accepted it as a condition of the countless policy victories he has delivered them.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE ANTI-ISRAEL MOVEMENT’S SLOGANS

The latest twists and turns in the Epstein saga are a bipartisan frustration, then. For Republicans, they’re a reminder of the man they’ve empowered and the sins they’ll accept. For Democrats, they’re a reminder of the alternatives people will turn to so as not to empower them.

And for both, Trump, a decade on, remains a source of tremendous cognitive dissonance. A figure of singular significance who, for all of his flaws and all of his accomplishments, will neither be remembered as the savior one side wants him to be, nor the cartoonish villain whose unflattering epitaph the other side yearns to write.

Isaac Schorr is an editor at Mediaite.