The Epstein Problem and MAGA
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I cover the White House.
NewYork Times
After years spent spreading spidery conspiracy theories for his own political gain, President Trump has found himself wrapped up in the stickiest one of them of all. For more than a week, the political movement he created has convulsed with righteous fury over Jeffrey Epstein and the things the administration has said and done — or rather not done — about his death.
Trump’s supporters simply cannot swallow the anticlimactic conclusion that the Justice Department reached eight days ago when it said: There’s nothing to see here, folks. No secret client list, no ties to foreign governments, no clique of Washington protectors who shielded the financier and his friends from justice for preying on girls. Over the weekend, a rabble of conspiracists who’ve been hand-fed for years by Trump broke into open revolt.
The fallout is testing the power that the president holds over his most loyal followers, the ones who’ve trusted him all along and who believed they would learn a whole lot more about the Epstein saga if they returned Trump to office.
The unconvinced
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Attorney General Pam Bondi, center, looking at President Trump, who is out of focus.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general. Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Maybe the revolt will sputter out, but it has been stunning to behold. It is a Möbius strip of paranoia and distrust: A political movement that began with a conspiracy theory — lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace were central to Trump’s rise — is cannibalizing itself over another conspiracy theory.
And in a novel twist, Trump’s usual playbook for getting himself out of trouble didn’t work. In a social media post on Saturday, he blamed Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for unresolved Epstein mysteries.
But the base wasn’t buying it. “People are really upset at the outright dismissal of it,” said Natalie Winters, a 24-year-old protĂ©gĂ© of Stephen Bannon. As Mike Cernovich, the prolific pro-Trump social media commentator, wrote online, “Trump’s persuasive power over his base, especially during his first term, was almost magical. … The reaction on Epstein should thus be startling to him.”
One person close to Trump conceded that the president didn’t grasp how deep and wide the discontent was because he doesn’t spend all that much time on the internet, where Epstein conspiracies breed. The 79-year-old president’s media diet consists primarily of cable news and print newspapers. But by Monday, news networks like CNN were devoting much more airtime to the uproar.
A test of loyalty
This is not the first time Trump’s base has bristled at him. The faithful grumbled when he encouraged Americans to take Covid vaccines or dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities.
But the conjecture around Epstein’s crimes and death is a many-layered mania that can’t really be compared to anything else. The shadowy concepts that undergird the whole thing go to the “very foundation of MAGA,” as Winters put it, because “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.”
She lamented that Trump and the people who work for him now had campaigned against the deep state and failed to deliver. “Finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar — and I don’t believe that — or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.”
The fallout is fundamentally about whether Trump can corral the conspiracy-driven forces that he weaponized. He sprang to power at a time of deep mistrust in this country after two wars and a financial crisis, selling himself as the only one who would tell the truth about a corrupt uniparty cabal that sold out the United States.
But now that he is the one in control of the government, he is telling his supporters to move on from all of that. It has left many of them mystified.
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