The Brooklyn Rail

“What is it about Jeffrey Epstein that’s so infuriating to people?” asked Tucker Carlson last Friday. “So infuriating that it’s actually causing seismic political problems? It’s the frustration of normal people, watching a certain class of people get away with everything every single time.” And Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to the Trump Administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files in this way: “I just think it’s a punch in the gut when regular people go to jail all the time, when they mess up and do something wrong, and then it always seems the rich powerful elites escape.”

For the last decade, Donald Trump has been telling people that the way this country chooses winners and losers is rigged. He was of course right about that. And he has told them that, if they elected him, he would fix everything, and only he could do this, because of his special intelligence and skills. He would tell the truth about the system, expose the nefarious forces that run this rigged system, and ultimately tear it all down and build a different, more just system. And the people were so sick and tired and desperate for another way that they believed him.

Now Donald Trump is facing a raging revolt by his MAGA base that could ultimately threaten his whole enterprise. He is scrambling to defuse it, but it stubbornly continues to build, because it is fundamental to the origins and growth of that movement. Trump rose as a political force by inventing and fueling one conspiracy theory after another, and these conspiracy theories were repeated and elaborated by the growing right-wing media juggernaut: birtherism, violent criminal immigrants, rigged elections, Haitians eating pets—an endless supply of conspiracies. And at the center of the whole thing was Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-abuse criminal network, which had the distinct advantage of being real. A thousand victims were abused. As Steve Bannon has said, Epstein was the key that picks the lock on the whole thing. It was a conspiracy involving lots of elite individuals (mostly Democrats in the Right’s telling), who abused underage girls and got away with it because they were rich and well-connected, and were protected by lawyers and politicians and a corrupt justice system. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and many others built lucrative careers for themselves as podcasters and influencers by focusing on this outrage and continually amping it up.

A lot of people turned to Trump because he saw and understood and encouraged their righteous outrage over this injustice and others. They followed him because they were convinced he was going to build something out of this outrage. And he was going to be transparent and tell them the truth about these things. It became a powerful cultural movement. As long as Trump supported and encouraged that, they would remain loyal to him and ignore pretty much everything else he did or said. That was the deal.

When Trump was elected the second time, the MAGA base believed that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI and Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice would release all of the Epstein files that had been suppressed by the Democrats, and the liberal elite monsters involved in Epstein’s child sex-ring would be exposed and prosecuted. Finally!

But that’s not what happened. When asked in a Fox News interview in 2024 if he would declassify the Epstein files if re-elected, Trump prevaricated: “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so, because you don’t know—you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole . . . world. But I think I would.”

After hyping the release of the Epstein files repeatedly, Attorney General Pam Bondi made a big show of releasing a few documents that were long available already, and in the end declared the entire matter closed, in a two-page memo. It essentially said there were no Epstein files, or at least no Client List, there was no blackmail, and it turns out, he did in fact die by suicide in jail awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

The response to this Bondi announcement by the MAGA base was immediate and overwhelming. What did she mean, there’s nothing to this? That would mean the entire MAGA movement was built on a lie, a flimsy fabrication. Why would she say such a thing?

And for some others, the seed of apostasy took root. Perhaps Trump was refusing to release the files because, as Elon Musk had bellowed via X in the midst of their breakup, “Trump is in the Epstein files!” Perhaps Trump was actually involved in the sex trafficking and the elaborate conspiracy was concocted to obscure that.

A part of MAGA world had come to believe that God anointed Trump to bring the pedophiles and all other evildoers to justice, and God spared him in the assassination attempt one year ago so that he could lead them to victory over the forces of evil. What if they chose a false messiah?

In a long and delirious Truth Social post on July 12th, Trump first said the files did not exist, and then, immediately after, that the files did exist, but they were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” The chronological impossibility of this is only the most obvious flaw among many in this completely new conspiracy theory. If the Democrats fabricated the Epstein files, why didn’t they put them out in public to attack Trump? This absurd post got Trump ratioed on his own platform (45,000 comments versus only 40,000 likes and 12,900 reshares). The MAGA base had turned on him.

Then Trump doubled down, saying “Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fell into the net” set by Democrats. He began calling the MAGA rank and file “bad people.” He went even further on Truth Social on July 16, saying the Democrats’

new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

So now the Epstein Files have become the Epstein Hoax, perpetrated by the Democrats, and anyone who mentions it is now a weakling and a hoaxster for the Dems. So what does that mean about the Epstein past? What does it mean for the 1000 victims of sexual abuse? Was it all a lie? Or is Trump involved? In Tucker Carlson’s terms, is Donald Trump now part of that “certain class of people” who “get away with everything every single time?”

The Trump White House may still find a way to get past this in the short term. Pam Bondi may have to be the fall gal. Bannon says appoint a Special Prosecutor. Even Speaker Johnson says Congress has to do something. Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky says release all the files now. But whatever happens, it’s not going to be the same, going forward. Something has shifted.

Kara Swisher, on her Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway on July 15, made a very strong case that this shift proves that if Trump goes away, the whole MAGA movement may rapidly disintegrate. He is at the epicenter of a tangled web of lies and half-truths that are only held together by the Word coming down from the Conspirator-in-Chief, spinning wildly. If his complicity and culpability and weapons-grade mendacity become visible to the faithful, and they stop believing, the web will collapse into itself.