Conservative writer Nick Catoggio has long been quick to concede one point about President Donald Trump, even amid sharp criticism: the president’s “Teflon” political resilience is impressive. But on Tuesday, writing in his Boiling Frogs newsletter for The Dispatch, Catoggio said he was surprised to find himself admitting that Trump’s Teflon armor over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal appears to be cracking.

Trump’s name appears generously throughout the investigative files on Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker who died in a federal jail in 2019 while awaiting trial. Back in 2025, Catoggio predicted that Trump’s voters would obediently back off once Trump ordered them to drop the subject. That, he now says, does not appear to be the case.

The reassessment follows damning reports — including a Wall Street Journal bombshell — that Trump allegedly sent Epstein a lewd birthday message in 2003 alluding to “certain things in common” the two men shared. Afterward, Trump warned in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, that no true fan of his would be suckered by the Jeffrey Epstein “hoax” he said was being perpetrated by Democrats and the liberal press, and he blasted right-wingers who remained suspicious of him.

“Surely his followers would obey his commands. Don’t they always?” Catoggio demanded at the time. “The Journal’s bombshell is effectively, and ironically, the end of the scandal as a political threat to Trump rather than the start. MAGA simply lacks the civic integrity to keep pursuing the truth about Epstein now that it’s been transformed, stupidly and cynically, into a referendum on the media.”

“[But] was I wrong?” Catoggio now asks, pointing to polling that found public belief in an Epstein cover-up to be widespread and bipartisan. Among Republicans, 57 percent said they suspect the government is keeping information about the sex trafficker secret, and 17 percent said they believe the cover-up is aimed at concealing “significant” material in the files about Trump.

“Forget Republicans, though,” said Catoggio. “Among independents, a group whom Trump came within 3 points of winning in 2024, opinion on Epstein is radioactive. Fully 81 percent think the government is hiding things about him, and 66 percent(!) suspect that ‘significant’ information about the president has something to do with the reason why.”

In an America with no war in the Middle East and inflation at 2 percent, none of that would matter in November’s midterm elections, Catoggio argued, adding that only “the most committed cranks” would vote against the ruling party at a moment when things are going well economically and overseas simply because they are angry that Trump has not opened the Epstein files. But in a nation trapped in a “forever war,” with diesel at $6.50 per gallon, the Epstein issue may be “just the trick” that grants “disaffected Trumpy populists psychological ‘permission’ to break with him without feeling like traitors by doing so.”

Many of those supporters might otherwise have stood by Trump on Iran and refused to betray him to the left, Catoggio suggested. But the fact that he “crossed them on Epstein last year” may have “given them a face-saving way to express their broader disenchantment with his presidency.”

“It was he who betrayed them by not eagerly exposing America’s pedophile class, a supreme populist priority, and so now they’re free to oppose him on anything they like. Including the war,” Catoggio wrote.

He added that a record-high share of the public now believes the government is corrupt, and that this view among Republicans has barely budged. “Trump’s supporters know he’s corrupt, in other words, and they know it well enough that they can’t be bothered to pretend otherwise even when talking to pollsters,” Catoggio said. “… The swamp won because Trump wanted it to win, those supporters might conclude — on war, on influence peddling, and on Jeffrey Epstein. If any meaningful part of the right ends up entertaining that possibility in November, the president and his party are cooked.”