A Crisis of MAGA Faith
Trump’s knee-jerk antagonism of some of his most faithful supporters over the Epstein Affair could come at a real price.
How’s this for a vibe check: A Quinnipiac University poll yesterday found that a whopping 63 percent of voters disapprove of how the Trump administration is handling the Epstein-files controversy, with a scant 17 percent approving. Happy Thursday.
What Would William of Ockham Say?
by William Kristol
When we need help understanding what Donald Trump’s up to—when we have trouble cutting through all the turmoil, the distractions he creates, the smoke he sends up to obscure the truth—to whom can we turn?
How about the medieval Franciscan friar, William of Ockham? He’s the character who famously laid out the principle, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. It’s known as Occam’s razor. If you’re trying to solve a problem or to understand a phenomenon, consider the simplest or most straightforward explanation.
What’s the simplest explanation for Trump’s refusal to release any information about the Epstein files? What’s the most straightforward explanation for Trump’s far-fetched attempts at deflection? What’s the most likely explanation for his lashing out at supporters who aren’t obeying his instructions to shut up?
It’s that there’s information in those files that Trump doesn’t want to see the light of day.
We don’t know just what that information is. We do know Trump is insisting on not releasing it, and that he’s not even bothering to advance plausible reasons for not releasing it. And in doing so, he’s paying a price in antagonizing some of his MAGA supporters.
Which takes us from the 14th century thinker William of Ockham to the 20th century thinker Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. MAGA is the closing of the American mind on steroids. It’s not close-mindedness due to mere ignorance or complacency or a bad education. It’s a radical closing of the mind to evidence due to a full-fledged embrace of conspiracism.
MAGA is all about conspiracies. QAnon, with its account of elite Satanist pedophiles running the government and much else, has been perhaps the central one of those conspiracies. And the Epstein case has been an important part of the QAnon narrative.
As John Stoehr points out in his latest Editorial Board newsletter, Trump is now in a position of looking as if he’s eager to cover up this conspiracy, rather than to expose it. Indeed he’s become part of the conspiracy. This has created a crisis of faith for MAGA believers.
In his newsletter, Stoehr has a very interesting interview with the investigative journalist Lindsay Beyerstein. Beyerstein points out that “When Trump says there’s nothing to see with the Epstein files, no rich co-conspirators, no nothing, he’s effectively saying that QAnon is fake.” That is a blow to the heart of MAGA.
Beyerstein continues:
Charlie Kirk literally came out and said that he was going to stop talking about Epstein against his better judgment, because his friends in the White House told him to. This is less than 72 hours after everyone at his 7,000-person conference raised their hand to say they were upset at Trump over his handling of the Epstein issue.
Conspiracists’ ears perk up when they hear that someone has to shut up because powerful people ordered them to.
And so MAGA is in serious revolt. As Beyerstein goes on to explain:
You’ve got Sarah Longwell’s focus group that found that, among 2024 Trump voters who are upset about his handling of the Epstein case, they overwhelmingly suspect that Trump is in on the conspiracy. That’s an unthinkable reaction given how unwilling MAGA has been to entertain that Donald Trump is ever wrong, let alone evil.
This is the first time I’ve seen large numbers of MAGAs willing to suspect the worst of Trump personally. It’s a sea change.
That can’t be unthought, even if it can be repressed.
I’d add this: It’s one thing for Trump to fall short of his supporters’ expectations. It’s one thing not to make certain documents available. Supporters might be able ultimately to rationalize that in various ways.
But when Trump derided the Epstein matter as the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” that was a bridge too far.
That could mean only one of two things: Either Trump’s gone over to the other side and is now a part of the coverup. Or Trump is now telling the truth. But if it really was a hoax all along—well, were all the conspiracies hoaxes? Was Trump insincere in promoting them? Were his supporters deceived? Was his son deceived? Was his vice president deceived? Is MAGA itself just a hoax?
This is why, politically, Epstein matters. We are witnessing a crisis of MAGA faith. We could even be witnessing the beginning of the opening of the MAGA mind.
Jerome Powell’s Job Isn’t Safe Yet
by Andrew Egger
Bad news! Markets reeled yesterday morning amid a blizzard of reports that Donald Trump was on the brink of firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Good news! They quickly surged back after Trump appeared to contradict that story in Oval Office comments to reporters. “I don’t rule out anything, but I think it’s highly unlikely,” Trump said. “Unless he has to leave for fraud.”
It’s nice that traders found this reassuring. I’m not sure I do.
Trump’s basic problem with Powell is his independence. Trump wants to be able to command the Fed to lower interest rates; Powell, worried that cutting rates too soon could risk inflation roaring back, has resisted these calls. But the Fed’s decision-making is supposed to be independent, and federal law is explicit that Powell can only be fired for cause. If he liked, Trump could just try anyway, tossing up a “You’re Fired, Jerome” post on Truth Social while channeling his inner Michael Scott: “I have cause. It is because I hate him.” But he’d be rolling the dice that the Supreme Court would let him get away with it.
That doesn’t appear to be the strategy the White House is pursuing. Instead, as we noted briefly in yesterday’s Morning Shots, they’re hard at work manufacturing a pretext for Powell’s possible firing: that cost overruns in a renovation project of Fed headquarters constitute “gross mismanagement” or even fraud. In an open letter to Powell last week, Office of Management and Budget Chair Russell Vought noted that the White House found these overruns highly disturbing. “The president is extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System,” he admonished.
Of course, no serious person believes these ostensible overruns are the real reason Trump is mad at Powell. But many serious people believe they could serve as a useful fig leaf. The current conservative Supreme Court has, with a few exceptions, let Trump push the boundaries of presidential power this year, so long as the White House has gone to the effort of constructing a halfway plausible legal rationale for the moves. Call it the at least buy us dinner first approach.
The “gross mismanagement” strategic play looks like the next version of that approach. It’s highly unlikely I’ll fire Powell, unless this fraud business forces my hand is an all-but-explicit endorsement of the strategy. Look at me, Chief Justice Roberts! Observe me as I decline to fire Powell capriciously—and instead prepare to fire him for good cause!
None of this, of course, is to say Trump will inevitably fire Powell. He may blanch at the market destabilization that would inevitably result. Perhaps yesterday was meant as a trial run to see what would happen if he moved forward. Certainly one hopes the brief stock plunge that took place when everyone thought Powell was about to be fired gives Trump plenty to think about. But nobody should rest easy on the subject until this gambit about supposed Fed fraud is safely in the rearview mirror.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Do They Have Your Attention Now? Democrats are finally beginning to appreciate the significance of the attention economy, writes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
Epstein Scandal Keeps Shaking Trumpworld… On the latest episode of The Next Level, TIM, SARAH and JVL debate whether Trump’s reaction to the Epstein files, calling it a “hoax” and lashing out at former supporters, marks a turning point.
The International Order is Dead… ERIC and ELIOT welcome REBECCA FRIEDMAN LISSNER and MIRA RAPP-HOOPER to Shield of the Republic to discuss their recent article in Foreign Affairs, “Absent at the Creation?: American Strategy and the Delusion of a Post-Trump Restoration.”
Breakdown at the FBI… Kash Patel is gutting the FBI, reassigning top agents to ICE round-ups and purging career professionals. TIM MILLER talks with BEN WITTES and ex-FBI deputy MIKE FEINBERG about the fallout, the Republican party’s silence on Emil Bove, and Ukraine’s air defense needs.
Quick Hits
THE EPSTEIN STORY IS FIRED: During Trump’s first term, reporters learned a hard lesson: Just because Trump is acting guilty doesn’t necessarily mean he is. He may have desperately battled the Mueller investigation at every turn, to the point where he very likely obstructed justice—but that didn’t mean Vladimir Putin orchestrated an unspeakable plot to install him as a Manchurian candidate (as opposed to just weakening U.S. democracy). And it didn’t mean the pee tape was real.
This lesson is worth bearing in mind as Trump continues his hilarious education in the Streisand Effect, growing wilder and wilder in tone and action as he fruitlessly commands his base to stop paying attention to this Epstein story, dammit! Yesterday morning, it was his absurd announcement that anyone who still cares about the lingering questions around the dead sex offender isn’t welcome on his team anymore. Last night, it was the abrupt firing of Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey—the daughter of James Comey who also happens to have worked on the criminal cases against Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Here’s the New York Times on the firing:
There was no explicit indication that Ms. Comey’s firing was related to her work on the cases against Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for her role in a yearslong scheme to sexually exploit underage girls.
But as recently as Tuesday, Ms. Comey’s role in their cases was highlighted in a Politico article, which noted that she had argued against the disclosure of investigative records.
It stands to reason that Ms. Comey, as one of the lead prosecutors in Mr. Epstein’s case, would have asked that certain information remain private, as is standard in sensitive cases involving victims of sexual violence. The Justice Department could move to unseal those files, if it chose.
But the firing raises the possibility that Ms. Comey is being set up as a scapegoat as the administration fights to move past the scandal.
IF WE DON’T PASS IT NOW, HOW CAN WE FIX IT LATER?: Slowly but surely, the Sensible Moderate Republican™ is learning to make his way in the Congress of Trump 2.0. The strategy several senators have now trial-ballooned: admitting a bill is bad, voting for it anyway, and insisting you’ll get around to fixing the bad parts down the road.
Just weeks ago, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted for the Big Beautiful Bill despite insisting it was bad law, expressing a Pollyannaish hope that the House would make further changes and send it back to the Senate for another round of negotiations. (Instead, of course, the House rubber-stamped the package and sent it straight to Trump’s desk.)
This week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced a bill to undo the Medicaid cuts and damage to rural hospitals that were part of the same BBB that Hawley himself just voted for. And yesterday, outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) suggested he might have to do something similar with the Senate’s rescissions package. “I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret,” Tillis said on the Senate floor. “Some second- and third-order effects. And I suspect that when we do we’ll have to come back and fix it.” Hours later, he voted for the package.
Cheap Shots
What does it say about core MAGA devotees that questions about the Epstein “files” have turned more of them against Trump than all of the horrible things he has done and said?
Why didn't Trump anticipate that there was damning information about him in the Epstein Files? He's never been that dumb before! He had years to think about it. If I had been on the plane to Epstein's island, I would never mention Epstein again for the rest of my life.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/they-just-arent-buying-it