The Five MAGA Factions Waging an Epstein Civil War

A taxonomy of truculent Trumpists.

Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Kash Patel, Scott Adams, and Roger Stone featured in a web with screenshots of Donald Trump’s name in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight log along with screenshots from the declassified evidence list released by the Department of Justice—while Epstein’s face looms like a big orange Oz. (Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages)

The Leopard Will Eat the Face

TRUMP WORLD FELL INTO CHAOS just before the weekend, as the shock from the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein memo continued to reverberate. Donald Trump’s initial response—a long Saturday-afternoon post that urged everyone to just get over it—earned the president a rare hostile “ratio” on Truth Social, his own social media platform. Even right-wing media figures who would normally fall in line behind the president took issue with his long, meandering, often self-contradictory statement, apparently unwilling to alienate their Epstein-crazed audiences.

Maybe worse, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—whose high level of interest in the public’s view of him has been a recurring subject of this newsletter—appeared on the verge of resigning in outrage over Attorney General Pam Bondi’s move to declare the Epstein case closed. (Bongino did reportedly show up to work today, which we didn’t realize was optional for the second in command at the FBI.)

Everyone, it seems, now hates everyone else. Which was the perfect backdrop for all of them to congregate at a big party in Florida, the perfect location for a mid-July gathering!

Administration officials and MAGA luminaries like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson descended upon Tampa last weekend for Charlie Kirk’s Student Action Summit. In its first iteration of the new Trump term, Turning Point USA’s recurring young-conservative confab should’ve been a celebration. Instead, it became a fraught family reunion where attendees publicly tried to hash out whether everyone should just swallow their pride and move on from the Epstein saga as Trump had directed them to do.

Over the course of the event, it became clear that there are now five distinct Epstein factions within the MAGA movement, creating a type of factionalism that is uncommon among Trump’s backers. Here, dear reader, is your handy guide to those factions.

1. The “Get Over It” Crowd

If Trump’s remarks before his cabinet meeting on Tuesday about getting over Epstein didn’t send a clear enough message to his allies, his farcical allegation over Truth Social on Saturday that Barack Obama had somehow tampered with or even fabricated the Epstein files made it clear that he’s not reopening the Epstein investigation and folks should give it up.

That prompted some of the right’s biggest names to, finally, fall in line. FBI Director Kash Patel, who declared before taking office that the FBI director controlled Epstein’s “black book” and that Trump should campaign on a promise to “roll [it] out,” said on X on Saturday that “the conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been.”

But no one swung on Epstein harder or more clumsily than Charlie Kirk himself. As the possibility of Dan Bongino’s resignation loomed, Kirk appeared at a conference event on Friday alongside fellow MAGA travelers Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon to fume together about the lack of Epstein disclosure.

Kirk complained that the media wasn’t asking enough questions about Epstein. In one of the weekend’s more amusing speeches, he complained that shadowy forces had tricked Posobiec when attorney general Pam Bondi gave him one of the cursed “Epstein binders.”

“Jack was used,” Kirk said of Posobiec, not exactly in a friendly way.

“And like a sap, you believed them,” Bannon added to Posobiec.

Posobiec scowled.

But then Kirk started to shift. On Saturday—the same day he reportedly received a phone call from Trump attempting to rein him in—Kirk said he had reviewed an email exchange about the memo’s release that supposedly cleared Attorney General Pam Bondi of being implicated in any kind of coverup. (That Kirk is being used to vouch for the credibility of the attorney general is a remarkable sign of the times.)

Then on Monday, Kirk went a step further and announced on his show that he was moving on from the Epstein issue until further notice.

“Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being,” Kirk said. “I’m going to trust my friends in the administration. I’m going to trust my friends in the government.”

2. Epstein Dead-Enders

It’s not so easy for everyone to move on from Epstein. That’s because, for Trump supporters, the Epstein case has come to symbolize something that goes far beyond the mysterious rich sex criminal and his circle of friends.

They see it instead as the most notorious example of a permanent theme in American society: the elites getting one over on the common man. For this part of Trump world, Epstein has come to stand for everyone and everything that screws the little guy: mass immigration to depress wages, housing unaffordability, and much more. If the elites can keep abusing girls with impunity, what else can they get away with?

That was the core message of Tucker Carlson’s speech at the TPUSA conference, which tied the abrupt end of the Epstein investigation into a host of populist complaints. In Tucker’s telling, Epstein was somehow part and parcel of crippling credit-card interest rates and transgender sports debates.

A lot of the simmering anger over Epstein relates to Israel; many conspiracists claim that Epstein was a Mossad agent, and Carlson said in his speech that Epstein was working for the Jewish state.

As a result, much of the debate over whether to move on from Epstein is divided along the same lines as the earlier intra-MAGA debate over whether to go to war with Iran. Israel critics like Candace Owens, Bannon, and Carlson are on one side, and Israel supporters like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro are on the other.

3. The Show-Trial Compromisers

The Trump administration and its still-reliable culture war allies seem to be offering the president’s angry supporters a compromise. Rather than prosecuting the pedophiles allegedly on some Epstein list, maybe instead we could launch trumped-up cases against some unrelated national security and law enforcement officials?

On Sunday, reliably pro-Trump website Just the News reported that the FBI under Patel is operating a sprawling probe aimed at participants in a so-called “grand conspiracy” of government weaponization. The remit of the investigation (and the special prosecutor whose appointment is being considered) comprises an impressive variety of government actions that Trump supporters have been mad about—in some cases for the better part of a decade. The grievances touch on everything from the failure to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her email server to former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal cases against Trump.

The idea that the Epstein case must be put on the back burner to focus on politicized prosecutions against other Trump foes has caught on among parts of the larger MAGA influencer network. Conspiracy theorist Lara Logan defended Bondi on X, suggesting the attacks over her handling of the Epstein matter might be meant to distract from an investigation of former CIA director John Brennan.

It makes sense, in a way, that Logan and others would latch on to this.¹ For Trump fans, a huge part of the Epstein case’s appeal was that the “client list” was supposed to be a long list of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities. With the Justice Department saying the list doesn’t exist, those fans have to get that red meat somewhere else.

Even Bannon is coming around to this position. On Thursday, he proposed a special counsel to investigate Epstein—but with a portfolio that would inexplicably also include the 2020 election and the Russia investigation.

4. The Cabal Accommodationists

Once, QAnon believers urged one another to put blind faith in Trump and “trust the plan,” knowing in their hearts that he would take on and ultimately defeat the pedophile cabal.

Now, some of Trump’s media allies are saying their audiences should “trust the plan” and leave the powerful cabal alone.

For example, comedian Tim Dillon suggested that if Trump pushed further on the Epstein case, the cabal would kill him.

But no one has gone further than Dilbert creator and MAGA pontificator Scott Adams. While Patel is arguing that the Epstein case is just not as big as its advocates have claimed, Adams suggests that the pedophile cabal is very real indeed—so real, in fact, that it’s just too powerful for Trump to take on directly. Giving up on Epstein, Adams argues, will at least ensure Republicans stay in power.

“Would you favor full disclosure if you knew it would derail a peace negotiation?” Adams posted on Sunday, in a tweet he subsequently deleted. “Would you favor full disclosure if you knew it would end Republican control of Congress and plunge the country back into a Democrat open-border hellscape?”

In a video to his fans, Adams added that they needed to trust Trump because “you don’t live in a democracy.”

“When he says it’s time to move on, wink wink wink, I feel it’s time to move on,” Adams said.

5. The Oblivious

No one has more badly misjudged the current Epstein moment than longtime Trump-world creature Roger Stone, who gave a speech at the TPUSA conference while dressed in his customary Al Capone-chic. Stone told the audience about a conversation he’d purportedly had with a reporter who kept asking Stone, “What about Epstein?” In Stone’s recounting, he steadfastly ignored the question and touted Trump policy accomplishments. As Stone talked up the Big Beautiful Bill and the Golden Dome missile shield, the reporter just kept bringing up the infamous pedophile.

Stone probably thought this was a clever way to illustrate the stance he believed everyone at the devout MAGA gathering would happily adopt on the issue: essentially, deflection combined with prayer that everyone will just be quiet about the sicko cabal. After all, ‘don’t give the media an inch’ is a bit of classic messaging theory from Trump himself.

But in practice, Stone’s anecdote resulted in hundreds of energized young activists shouting his “What about Epstein?” line back at him. Things got particularly bad, as Stone extended his rhetorical gambit for more than ten minutes. Every time he tried to talk about some Trump win, he was met with the same refrain he claimed to have heard from the hostile journalist: “What about Epstein?” Except this time, it was coming from the home crowd.

1. Correction (July 15, 2025, 7:20 a.m. EDT): As originally published, this sentence said “Loomer” instead of “Logan.”