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It is, admittedly, difficult to follow the Jeffrey Epstein story. The saga has been churning along for so long now—with so many twists and turns—that I don’t really blame anyone for not knowing what to make of this most recent wave of intrigue. Thankfully, I’ve been paying close enough attention to highlight what you should care about as Donald Trump barrels toward a confrontation with whatever his associations were with the elusive sex trafficker. Buckle up! It’s going to get weird.

OK, so why is a bunch of Epstein stuff coming out right now?

Epstein has been an obsession of the far right and far left for years. But that obsession didn’t fully catch on among liberal Democrats until Trump took office for a second time. That’s when the rarest of phenomena occurred: The MAGA base got mad at Trump over his failure to release the legendary Epstein files, a group of documents (that may or may not exist) that would blow the whole scandal wide open. But as Trump sat on the documents, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee kicked into high gear—with the full backing of the liberal base. This has created a strange situation in which much of the country has suddenly remembered that the president once had close ties with the disgraced financier—despite the fact that those associations have never been a secret.

Regardless, the rest of the House is set to vote on releasing the contents of the Justice Department’s investigation into Epstein, which are colloquially known as those aforementioned Epstein files. Ahead of that discharge, though, the Oversight Committee has been releasing select cuts of its trove in a deliberately partisan way. On Wednesday, Democrats put out a couple of emails exchanged by Epstein that seemed to imply that Trump had extended contact with one of the women the financier sex trafficked. Republicans countered by releasing 20,000 more emails, which detailed Epstein’s wider social network.

And what in those files are germane to Trump?

The splashiest email was sent by Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell—you may have heard of her—in 2011. In it, Epstein notes that Trump spent “hours at my house” with one of Epstein’s unnamed victims. He calls the president the “dog that hasn’t barked.” Generally speaking, this is not the way you want the world’s most famous pedophile characterizing you.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

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