From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrowaf. This is the Daily.

For the past two weeks, President Trump has been trying and failing to get his base to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, my colleagues David Enrich and Sean McCreach

explain why MAGA won't let go of this scandal,

how the president misread his own base,

and what all this shows about the limits of Trump's power.

It's Monday, July 21st.

David, we're in the middle of a crisis that the White House has so far been unable to control,

which is this growing anger over the administration's refusal to release the

complete files in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. You're an investigative editor at the Times,

and you've been involved in some of the biggest investigations that the Times has done

surrounding Epstein. So we've come to you to understand why won't this go away?

This won't go away because it involves a collection of some of the world's richest and most powerful people and institutions and a whole slew of unanswered questions.

So to just step back for a sec, let's just start with the story that most of us know about

Jeffrey Epstein.

He was a self-styled financier living in New York and in Florida and on a private island.

He was associated with some really rich and famous people, most notably for our purposes,

probably Donald Trump, with whom he spent a lot of time in the 90s and early 2000s hanging

out, flying on planes together, and Trump at times remarked on their shared interest in women.

And the other really important thing about Epstein is that in 2008, he pleaded guilty to

sex crimes down in Florida, spent a brief period in jail.

And then in 2019, he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

...