Trump v. MAGA

The Epstein affair is the biggest rift yet

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Over the past few weeks, the MAGAsphere has been rocked by a number of internal schisms which have seen rare and intense criticism directed at Donald Trump and his closest aides. The principal causes of these bust-ups have been Iran, Ukraine, and… Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, the last is turning out to be the most serious of all.

As I’m sure you don’t need reminding, Epstein was a well-connected financier who spent years sexually abusing young women and girls while also moving in prestigious social circles. He was arrested in the summer of 2019 and committed suicide a month later. The fact that Epstein carried out his crimes in public view for so long has led to repeated charges of a cover-up and calls for accountability for Epstein’s high-profile friends. These friends included, by the way, Donald Trump.

When Epstein committed suicide in 2019, Trump was president. Nevertheless, Trump was quick to stoke conspiracy theories around his death, even though it occurred in a federal prison system that Trump controlled. Finding out more information about Epstein and his “client list” of famous friends who allegedly participated in his abuse has been a rallying cry among the MAGA faithful for years. Rumor had it that these “Epstein files” were somewhere in the federal government, and during last year’s campaign, Trump and many other figures now in his regime promised to release them.

Those of us who don’t swim in these conspiracy-laden waters can sometimes miss the significance of matters like the Epstein affair. For many influential figures in the MAGAsphere and the voters who listen to them, Democrats and “the deep state” are not just people with mistaken politics - they are satanic pedophiles dedicated to the pursuit of evil. The Epstein files were supposed to provide definitive proof of this fact to the MAGA faithful, who somehow were never concerned over what they might actually reveal about Trump.

So, when the Trump regime this week announced that actually the Epstein files don’t exist and no more information about them will be forthcoming, MAGAworld was caught in a mixture of bewilderment and rage. It came as particularly surprising news to devotees of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who in February had said that the Epstein files were “sitting on my desk right now”. Many other figures in the regime - including FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino - had also spent literally years yammering on about the files and vowing that they would eventually see the light of day.

The uproar among MAGA influencers and politicians has been tremendous. Again, this can seem weird to us - why do they care much more about some probably non-existent files than Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid? As I explored in my deep dive into the worldview of Kash Patel late last year, it’s because this kind of cultural grievance and turbo-charged conspiratorial style is actually at the heart of the MAGA movement. And Trump has now gotten himself on the wrong side of it.

It’s not hard to fathom why this would happen. Trump is not nearly as ideological or consistent as many of his followers. The MAGA movement as we know it today is in many ways the product of Trump’s impulses and beliefs - it takes direction from him and gives wider form to his inchoate rage and grievance. But it is also made up of many people who have forged his impulses into something like a consistent worldview, and who are less shameless than he is. Trump is inconsistent because he’s fundamentally unintelligent and incurious about the world, and because he has come to expect his followers to stick with him whatever he does. That’s why his response to the blow-up has been to ask his followers “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?”

Well, yes, they are. Those followers drop some things because they understand on one level that they are political ploys. We’ve heard nothing about the immigrants supposedly eating dogs and cats in Ohio since just before the election last year, just as we heard nothing about “the caravan” at the southern border as soon as the 2018 midterms were over. But the Epstein affair was not just some passing bit of racism: it was central to MAGA epistemology. And now there turns out to be less to it than they were told, the MAGA faithful wants to know why.

Their rage seems to be going in a few different directions. One, a classic, is to blame the people around Trump rather than Trump himself. They are now accused of covering something up, or becoming part of the deep state. Trump himself is also a target of criticism, and that criticism might intensify if he doesn’t lean on other people in the regime to produce some red meat to toss to the faithful. Trump firing Bondi and then announcing that he found the report after all is certainly one way this could end.

Might this have electoral consequences? Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2028 anyway, and it’s hard to see MAGA voters switching team over this. If you think that Trump is somehow conspiring to not release all the information he has about how Democrats are pedophiles, it’s hardly a reason to vote for the Democrats. But one thing that rifts within MAGA could definitely do is depress turnout in the midterms, when Republicans struggle to turn out their increasingly less-educated, low-info coalition. And in the meantime, it makes for some pretty funny viewing.