The MAGA Revolution Is Eating Its Own
After years of stoking conspiracy theories, Trump and his allies now find themselves unable to dispel one.
THE EDITORS OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial page would very much like to see the Jeffrey Epstein matter resolved. They lament that the current Justice Department is staffed by clowns (though they would never use that language) whereas President Trump could have chosen “an Attorney General in the mold of Bill Barr, an experienced hand who could offer . . . straight talk without worrying about the conspiracy-minded podcast attacks.” Leaving aside the merits of Bill Barr (a mixed bag), the Journal editorialists are quite wrong to imagine that he or anyone else could calm these waters. Acknowledging the kooks who are actually in charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI respectively, they pine that perhaps
Ms. Bondi and Mr. Patel could call a news conference, provide context on the mentions of Mr. Trump [in the government’s investigatory files about Epstein], and explain why releasing raw files could do more harm than good. Bring FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, if he’ll show up. Then they and Mr. Trump could tell the public that the files didn’t live up to the hype, including theirs before they took office, the case is closed, and that’s that.
The Journal editorial board is engaged, as usual, in denial. They persist in imagining that we live in a pre-MAGA world. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel cannot conceivably hold the kind of press conference the editors are fantasizing about because they, among others holding high government offices, are key propagators of conspiracy theories about Epstein and a range of other things. Conspiracy theories are their calling card. Only in the last few weeks has Trump become the victim of one.
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Patel spread the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen by Italian satellites, claimed that January 6th was an inside job, and proclaimed about QAnon, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.” Bondi maintains that Trump won Pennsylvania in 2020, and she told the world in February that she had the Epstein files on her desk. Even as the Epstein story was creating heartburn in the White House, Team Trump’s response was to distract and feed the beast they have created by immediately turbocharging another conspiracy theory—that Barack Obama committed treason.
An authoritarian movement cannot demand acquiescence from a formerly liberty-preserving populace for just any old reason. It has to be an emergency. And that’s what the pedophile fantasy has always provided. MAGA doesn’t tell its followers to vote for Republicans because the Democrats have the wrong prescriptions for the price of groceries or housing costs or education policy (though it may touch on those matters from time to time). No, the heart of the MAGA message is that Trump’s opponents are not just wrong but part of a vast conspiracy to commit pretty much the worst crime most people can imagine. That’s why the MAGA faithful fervently pray for mass arrests in which the guilty will at last be separated from the innocent—a kind of secular Rapture.
As self-styled anti-censorship activist Mike Benz explained, belief in a widespread pedophile cult helped to birth the MAGA movement. “You trained us to go after this issue. We have been grown in a lab. Chemicals have been mixed together specifically to breed this type of person in the MAGA movement who would care about Jeffrey Epstein.”
At this point, it’s not even clear that those with access to the government’s information can distinguish between their imaginings and actual facts. Bondi pulled hundreds of prosecutors and other Justice Department officials from work on other crimes to scour the Epstein files for the motherlode of revelations about a “client list” and the participation of major Democrats and Hollywood elites in Epstein’s evil abuse.
To be clear, there is no question that Epstein committed terrible crimes, and his closeness to wealthy and powerful people is disturbing. But that’s not what the MAGA diehards conjured in their febrile imaginations. They had visions of a client list containing names like Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney, and Hillary Clinton (as well as Bill, of course). A steady diet of slander and deception has led them to believe that everyone in public life they disagree with on policy must be implicated in this repulsive conduct.
But after the weeks-long search, Justice Department investigators apparently found little more than what was already known, which led to furious finger-pointing. Bondi blamed Patel for withholding documents while FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino pouted that he was so worried about disappointing his mouth-breathing fans that he could not report to work. Then Bondi and Patel had the unenviable task of reporting to Trump that the most famous name their record searches yielded was his own—which is not surprising, considering the fifteen-year Trump-Epstein friendship.
And so the MAGA revolution is eating its own.
Lest we get too excited and imagine that imminent revelations about Trump’s participation in Epstein’s crimes would spell his political downfall, let’s recall that Trump was able to persuade Republicans in 2016 that he was best situated to take on the corruption in American politics because he had played the game himself. Voters didn’t mind that he was admitting to personal corruption because he turned it into a qualification to take on the system (what he later started calling the Deep State). Is it so hard to imagine that after a decade of ceaseless propaganda, the base might be debased enough to believe that Trump was merely pretending to abuse underage girls in order to blow up the whole smarmy system?
There is no evidence that Trump is a pedophile. On the other hand, there is evidence that he took a very latitudinarian attitude toward Epstein’s conduct, smirking about how they shared a love of beautiful women and that Epstein liked them on the “younger side.” When Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was facing prosecution for grooming teenagers, Trump said he wished her well. On Friday, he declined to rule out pardoning Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker. Some scourge of pedophiles he turned out to be.
Trump’s later-concocted story about banning Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because he was a “creep” was an obvious post-hoc gloss. He and Epstein were close enough to jet back and forth between Palm Beach and New York together on Epstein’s plane and to hold parties with “calendar girls” at which the two men were the only other guests.
After the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had sent Epstein a “bawdy” birthday message, Vice President JD Vance asked, “Does that sound like Donald Trump?” We can ask the same thing about Epstein’s banishment from Mar-a-Lago. Does it seem in character for Trump to exclude someone for moral turpitude? No, their relationship apparently ruptured because of a bitter competition over the auction of a Palm Beach estate ironically titled Maison de l’Amitie (House of Friendship).
The most cleansing outcome of this scandal would be for the MAGA faithful to be brought face-to-face with what lying, shameless lowlifes the people in the Trump crowd are. It would be a teachable moment if they were to see with their own eyes that the elaborate tales of pedophilia were all “boob bait for Bubba”; that it was all lies all the time. That, not pinning hopes on finding a smoking gun about Trump’s behavior, is the very best reason to release as many of the files as possible.