President Donald Trump has spent the last four months trying to tamp down MAGA dissent over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, only to finally fold to congressional demands for more federal records related to the late convicted sex offender. According to some of his most sycophantic supporters on right-wing TV, everything is going according to plan.

“Trump’s calling their bluff on the Epstein files,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Monday night. She then aired footage from earlier in the day in which the president, in a major reversal, said he would sign a bill the House of Representatives is taking up on Tuesday that mandates the release of Justice Department documents related to its sex-trafficking investigations into Epstein.

“Trump’s not hiding anything. He just said he’ll release everything the government has on Epstein," her colleague Jesse Watters crowed on the network’s next hour.

He then touted the House resolution, saying that it gives the DOJ “30 days to release everything they have on the dead pedophile. That includes the flight logs, his connections to powerful people, DOJ and FBI investigation files, and information about his 2008 sweetheart deal.”

Carl Higbie, a host of Fox competitor Newsmax, also got into the act, asking at the top of his broadcast: “Did Trump just pull like a UNO reverse on Democrats over the Epstein files?” He went on to say that “Democrats just got played” by the president saying he’d sign the Epstein bill.

“Now they have to release it,” he continued, “because all 214 Democratic Congress members signed on to the release to force the vote to release the Epstein files — against [House Speaker] Mike Johnson’s wishes, by the way, which was weird. But Trump comes out over the weekend, after months of telling people, ‘Drop it,’ and says, ‘You know what, guys, let’s just get them out there,’ and now no Democrats can hide, because last week they unanimously voted for it.”

If you’re following: Trump didn’t want the Epstein files released; Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and the Democrats did; Johnson failed to stop House Republicans from supporting the disclosure bill; Trump was about to lose, so he caved; now the records are on track to be released; and according to Ingraham, Watters, and Higbie, that adds up to a win for … Trump?

Portraying Trump’s cave as a masterful strategic gambit requires total contempt for the MAGA audience — but that’s nothing new for either Trump or his right-wing media supporters.

Back in July, the Trump DOJ and FBI roiled the right with a memo repudiating various claims that MAGA influencers — including, in years past, the current top leadership of the FBI — had offered about the disgraced financier’s life and death. Ever since then, the president has been trying to get his followers to focus elsewhere, and his zealous supporters at outlets like Fox have been happy to help.

But as new document releases provided more evidence of Trump’s own former close relationship with Epstein, Democrats and a handful of House Republicans signed on to a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein disclosure bill. And after Johnson’s stall tactics and Trump’s lobbying failed, the president reversed himself and got behind the bill he had fought to kill.

Trump’s decision is elsewhere being cast as a “capitulation" and a “debacle.” But within parts of the MAGA bubble, every Trump move has to be a brilliant victory.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters