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But first…

As Congress begins its first full week in session since September, G.O.P. solidarity will face its toughest challenge to date. Republicans stayed mostly united during the government shutdown (and on most issues before that, too), rebuffing offers to negotiate with Democrats over policy and largely refraining from criticizing their leadership’s management of the situation. But that was the easy part. This week, they’ll be forced to reckon with two high-stakes issues they’ve been dodging for months: a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and perhaps even more debilitating for the party, a debate on healthcare.

Indeed, Congress will be consumed with both this week, and probably for the foreseeable future. As their losses in this year’s elections made clear, voters may not be buying what Republicans are selling. How they handle these two issues could have a lasting impact on the party’s political fortunes in next year’s midterms and exacerbate a rift in the MAGA coalition that’s been growing wider by the day.

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Late Sunday night, Trump posted—and some of his top aides, including Karoline Leavitt and James Blair, reposted—a statement encouraging Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files, which will likely cause the number of yeas to skyrocket. “We have nothing to hide,” he wrote. “It’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.” Giving Republicans the okay is a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent months trying to block the release of the documents and was, until very recently, pressuring Republicans to stand down. But the apparent face-saving maneuver became necessary as it became increasingly clear that he was set to face the biggest defection of party members since January 6.

Sources I spoke to Friday and through the weekend expected that Trump would have worked extremely hard to whip members against the vote. “This is personal for him,” one senior Republican aide said, predicting that the president might try to turn the screws on members, even though the vote seems certain to pass, to ensure there is no veto-proof margin and to peel off as many Republicans as possible. His un-endorsement of Greene over the weekend spooked some of her Republican colleagues, Rep. Ro Khanna told me in the Meet the Press green room. Summoning Boebert into the Situation Room didn’t exactly alleviate Republican jitters, either.

Before Trump’s announcement, a vote to suppress the Epstein files would have forced members to choose between Trump and angering red-meat primary voters. Freedom Caucus member Andy Biggs, who is running in a crowded primary for governor in Arizona, had said he’d vote to release the files—essentially choosing his own political future over Trump, two things that are usually closely intertwined. Rep. Mace, one of the four Republican signatories on the discharge petition, hasn’t changed her vote despite Trump’s efforts, likely losing any chance of securing Trump’s endorsement in her South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Rep. Ralph Norman, another Freedom Caucus guy, is running in that same primary. He called for “transparency” in September and supported the House Oversight Committee’s investigation, but didn’t respond to a text message about how he’ll vote on the measure this week.

Meanwhile, Trump’s announcement was also an extension of his attempt over the past few days to redirect the Epstein narrative away from him, calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to specifically investigate the Democrats named in the latest batch of emails released by the House Oversight Committee. But that seems unlikely to satisfy Republicans, or to scare Democrats. After all, many of the lawmakers in Congress today have little connection to the bold-faced names of a bygone era—Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, etcetera—who appear in the files. Besides, as one Republican strategist put it, the political goal for Democrats isn’t necessarily to flip Republicans, but to throw “sand in the gears of base mobilization.” And the Epstein scandal is the perfect wedge issue to demoralize G.O.P. voters and convince them to stay home.

Trump is acutely aware that Republicans need to address healthcare costs, but Republicans are skeptical that he’ll come up with a plan—something he’s been teasing for more than a decade now. Indeed, according to multiple senior Republican aides, the White House hasn’t notified Congress of any specific healthcare components that should be changed. Trump has talked publicly about redirecting A.C.A. subsidies directly to people to put in their Health Savings Accounts, an issue that Republicans are getting behind. But beyond that, any notion of a Trumpcare alternative remains entirely undefined.

Historically, Republicans have been better at repealing or rolling back healthcare than at providing it. After all, the G.O.P. has traditionally pushed for fewer interventions in markets. And yet even in this more populist moment, when Trump has aggressively dictated terms to businesses, Republicans remain rudderless and divided on the issue, struggling to even agree on what to tackle: Do they push to reform subsidies? Address waste, fraud, and abuse? Or propose a broader overhaul of the system? Vulnerable Republicans in swing districts, including Virginia Rep. Jen Kiggans and California’s David Valadao, want to extend A.C.A. subsidies immediately, knowing they’ll be punished by midterm voters if premiums shoot through the roof. Polling by McLaughlin found that 57 percent of battleground voters are likely to vote for a candidate that extends A.C.A. subsidies. “Letting the healthcare tax credits expire makes incumbent Republicans vulnerable and provides Democrats a significant advantage on an informed generic ballot,” the firm said in a recent memo.

But a significant number of conservatives will never support any expansion of the Affordable Care Act, which is why the current Republican strategy has coalesced around making Obamacare as unpopular as possible—bashing it as too expensive or a giveaway to insurance companies, a bit of convenient selective populism. But altering the A.C.A. in an election year is not only infeasible—big legislation is usually done in off years—but politically risky. The most likely outcome, as one Republican operative put it, is that Trump will simply “return to A.C.A. bashing with the same promise he has always made—something better… very soon.”