Trump’s Big Epstein Distraction Isn’t Working
Plus: The new MAGA in-fighting over…polygamy?
Hope and Change the Subject
FACED WITH CONSERVATIVE backlash over the end of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, Donald Trump over the past week has engaged in what can only be described as a monumental distraction campaign.
The president has talked about stripping Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship. He’s posted a video of a woman grabbing a menacing snake (and a couple dozen other stunts). He’s threatened to withhold funding for a new D.C. football stadium until the Commanders change their name back to the Redskins. And then there’s been the pièce de résistance: How would his followers like to see Barack Obama imprisoned for treason?
On TruthSocial, Trump posted an AI-generated video of Obama being dragged out of the Oval Office by law enforcement. He then posted another with someone in an computer-generated Guy Fawkes mask laying out a treason case against the former president—in the current telling, because Obama supposedly concocted the Russia hoax as a quasi-coup against Trump.
Some of Trump’s followers latched on enthusiastically. “Will Obama be arrested soon?” Benny Johnson, now the fastest-growing political commentator on YouTube, asked on Monday.
Talk-radio host Vince Coglianese even polled his audience Monday on which member of the Obama administration they’d like to see arrested and dressed in an old-school black-and-white-stripe jail uniform first.
“Give me the mugshots, baby!” Coglianese said.
But as I dove into the MAGA internet to get a sense of whether this distraction was working as intended, I was surprised to discover that not everyone was buying it. Yes, it’s only been a few days. But my sense is that Trump is racking up a sort of hype-debt within the party, as he tries to refocus his base away from one disappointment by setting them up for an even bigger one when Obama fails to face a military tribunal.
Take Liz Wheeler, a conservative pundit who received one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fateful Epstein binders back in February, and has since become one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s attempt to shut down questions about Epstein. On Monday, demonstrating why she was trusted to participate in the binder photo-op in the first place, she gushed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had published “new evidence” of a scheme by senior members of the Obama administration to undermine Trump’s first term. (That was, coincidentally, a day after the infamous Wall Street Journal story on Trump writing a note to Epstein). Gabbard’s moves against Obama, she wrote, marked “the first glimmer of what I would call real justice.”
But even Wheeler couldn’t miss the contradiction here. If Obama and his aides committed treason, why don’t they actually get, y’know, arrested? Can a Trump Justice Department that can’t manage to release the Epstein documents without stepping on a series of rakes really pull off the criminal prosecution of an entire past presidential administration?
Wheeler said the only way to fulfill Trump’s new commitment to his supporters would be actual prosecutions.
“Arrest the people who committed the crime!” Wheeler said. “Arrest the traitors!”
Over on Patriots.win, the forum that replaced the “The_Donald” subreddit as the internet’s premiere pro-Trump gathering place, the effort to pivot Epstein fury onto Democrats is being mostly treated as beside the point.
“It’s really not adding up for me,” wrote one user, typifying the response from the site’s rank-and-file Trump supporters. “This thing sounds like the kind of talk babble and backtracking I get from nazi, megalomanical democrats.”
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Under normal circumstances, these people would be thrilled to envision Barack Hussein Obummer in an orange jumpsuit. (Or maybe a tan one, as depicted in another meme Trump reposted.) It’s the QAnon fever dream come to life! But compared to what they were promised—a wide-ranging criminal case that took down not only Obama but hundreds of other Democrats and proved they were part of an elite pedophile cabal—it’s a letdown.
Even if Gabbard had a point (and my Bulwark colleague Cathy Young has already demolished her argument), the question of whether the Obama administration responsibly handled various intelligence reports nine years ago just doesn’t hit quite like the Epstein case. On the one hand, you have a mysterious, globetrotting sex trafficker with connections to some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. It even has an indelible image to go along with it: a supposed note from Trump, with his signature in the place of a cartoon woman’s pubic hair.
The “arrest Obama” group has an illustration of their own, though less compelling and more out of an Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme: a comically complex 2018 flowchart from the Epoch Times that lists dozens of Obama officials who should supposedly wind up in prison. Bro podcaster Theo Von isn’t rushing to devote an episode to that one anytime soon—but he did ask on Twitter on Monday why House Republicans were leaving town for August recess without voting to release the Epstein files.
Right-wing influencers closely affiliated with the administration have taken up the new line that Obama should be heading for the clink. But the more troublesome ones—primarily conservatives who also criticized Trump’s decision to attack Iran—have remained persistently out of reach.
Consider Darryl Cooper, the podcaster and Tucker Carlson associate who goes by the name “Martyr Made” online and is best known for calling Winston Churchill the real villain of World War II. Late last week, he went on a podcast in which he pointed out that the abrupt pivot to Obama is a cynical distraction.
“This turnabout, all of a sudden—it makes people very suspicious,” Cooper said. “It’s just too abrupt.”
Pedro L. Gonzalez, a conservative pundit who has criticized the Trump administration, noted the enthusiastic participation in the Two Minutes Hate against Obama of those who received the administration’s Epstein binders, like Wheeler and Jack Posobiec. He pointed to it as evidence that the administration is using the Obama allegations to divert attention from Epstein.
“It could not be more obvious that this whole thing was conceived as a distraction for the Epstein stuff,” Gonzalez said. “They are literally using the ‘Phase 1’ binder stooges for it. I mean, come on. They’re not even trying.”
I could be wrong. Perhaps Americans who aren’t already in the Sean Hannity audience yearn to hear names like “Nellie Ohr” and “Fusion GPS” again. Maybe they’re jazzed to relive the Hillary Clinton email probe, as Trump’s DOJ seems eager to do. But no less a conspiracy theorist than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) expressed disappointment on Monday, suggesting that while she welcomed Obama’s arrest, she wanted the Epstein network arrested too.
“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” Greene said. “They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”
The right’s disappointment in Trump’s handling of the Epstein files has gotten so bad that any other move the administration makes on “transparency” has been seen as a distraction. On Monday afternoon, for example, Gabbard declassified hundreds of thousands of files related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
On X, the response was almost unanimous: Why, posters wanted to know, was Gabbard trying to distract from Epstein?
Bronze-Age Polygamy Debate Finds New Life on the Right
When it isn’t fighting about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, the MAGA movement has found yet another new cause for division: polygamy.
You might think that, in the overwhelmingly Christian right, this issue would have been settled centuries ago. Instead, it flared anew this weekend, pitting the churchgoing choir boys against the manosphere pickup artists.
The trouble began when Andrew Tate, now facing rape and trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, advocated on Sunday for men to take multiples wives and raise an armada of children with them. Monogamy, Tate argued in a lengthy screed on X, is a tool of “SATANIC CONTROL.”
That didn’t sit well with the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who takes a more anti-harem stance.
“Polygamy is savage and primitive and has always been widely rejected in civilized western society,” Walsh shot back. “People on both the right and the left are trying to drag the west into barbarism these days.
Tate countered that Walsh and any other male monogamy fans are essentially beta losers who don’t understand “modern women.”
Will Tate’s polygamous approach win converts on the American right? Myron Gaines, the dating-advice YouTuber who has palled around with several right-wing personalities, said Tate’s argument that society should be structured along the lines of many male “kings” taking multiple wives was “100% facts.”
And of course, Tate has been embraced in the past by some prominent figures in the Trump movement. U.S. attorney and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba, for example, has said she’s a “big fan,” and Trump himself allowed Tate back into the United States earlier this year.
“who takes a more anti-harem stance.”
*chef's kiss* Great line.
Wait. Didn't the NYT tell us this morning in their lead news story that Trump had successfully distracted his base (based on no actual evidence)? Is it possible the NYT wasn't playing this straight? I'm so confused by the newspaper of record.