As political issues go, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal wasn’t exactly front-page news for much of the year, but the more Donald Trump talked about it, and the more the president’s rhetoric proved provocative, the more the controversy intensified.

Part of the problem is that the White House has struggled to keep its story straight. Last week, for example, Trump told reporters that the entire mess was “a scam set up by the Democrats” — a bizarre argument, given his own Republican allies pushed the issue for years — before he added that it was Democrats who “controlled” the Epstein files during the Biden era.

The more one thinks about this, the less sense it makes. The president would have Americans believe that rascally Democrats “controlled” the Epstein files, manipulated it to their hearts’ content, only then to let it gather dust, leaving it on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk.

Trump’s line, in other words, wasn’t just self-defeating, it was also the sort of rhetoric that generated fresh speculation about why the president seemed so eager to discredit the files.

A few days later, Trump’s vice president sat down with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, and JD Vance tried a different kind of talking point:

We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. … Democrat [sic] billionaires and Democrat [sic] political leaders went to Epstein island all the time. Who knows what they did.

The Ohio Republican added that Trump has “demanded full transparency” on the issue.

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that Vance offered no evidence of Democratic donors or officials having done anything wrong. For that matter, we can brush past the fact that the White House’s line on the Epstein files obviously falls far short of “full transparency.”

What I find notable, however, is the gap between the president’s line and the vice president’s.

To hear Trump tell it, those darned Democrats might’ve put incriminating information about him in the Epstein files. To hear Vance tell it, those Democratic rascals might’ve actually hidden dirt on other Democrats.

But if that were true, why doesn’t the Republican White House just release the files? Why bother with the secrecy and contradictory stories if the vice president is correct and it’s “left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires” who joined Trump on Epstein’s list of friends?