'Hostile insiders': GOP pollster warns Trump is at war with his own 'brand'

01 August

U.S. President Donald Trump points a finger as he delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 31, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura

President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's response to the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to fuel a lot of infighting among MAGA Republicans. Trump is clearly fed up with the controversy, arguing that members of his party who are still heavily focused on Epstein are being "duped by Democrats." But former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is highly critical of Trump's assertion that MAGA needs to move on from Epstein.

In an op-ed published by the New York Times on August 1, GOP pollster and conservative CNN pundit Kristen Soltis Anderson argues that Trump's recent messaging on the "Epstein mess" is at war with his own "brand."

"Donald Trump once boldly claimed that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose voters," Anderson observes. "In the decade since, as Mr. Trump has persisted through scandals, controversies and an array of thorny challenges, I have been asked the same question over and over again in my capacity as a pollster: Will this be the thing that costs him his supporters? It almost never is. Save for a brief moment after January 6, 2021, Mr. Trump's support from his base has been rock-solid."

According to Anderson, the "Epstein saga" is "perhaps the starkest example of a schism between the president and his most loyal supporters."

"A growing volume of data shows that Mr. Trump's own voters nevertheless harbor concerns about how the Epstein issue is being handled," Anderson notes. "While Republicans routinely give Mr. Trump favorable job approval ratings on a wide range of issues, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed that only four in 10 Republicans specifically say they approve of his administration's handling of the Epstein files."

Anderson continues, "In a Washington Post poll published this wee k, only 38 percent of all Republicans — and 43 percent of MAGA Republicans — approve of the president's handling of the Epstein files…. But a deeper explanation for the stickiness of the issue is that it undermines the brand he has forged for his supporters, running directly counter to a core attribute that fuses Mr. Trump’s base to him: the sense that he is an outsider, fighting against a hostile class of insiders."

Anderson goes on to explain "why has this issue taken root," unlike other Trump-related controversies.

"Mr. Trump never presented himself as a saint or a rock-ribbed conservative," the GOP pollster stresses. "He memorably ran for president in 2016 against more than a dozen Republican adversaries who fought for the mantle of being the truest conservative. He prevailed even though he wound up being viewed as a conservative by fewer than half of voters that year. When he pushes boundaries on free-market principles, business friendliness, free trade or limited government, he may cause the Freedom Caucus heartburn, but his voters are largely unperturbed."

Anderson continues, "But Mr. Trump has always held himself up as an outsider, an opponent to the elites, a thorn in the side of the powerful and the establishment. It is this inside-outside dynamic that let him overcome the right-left ideological battles that might have otherwise undone him in that 2016 primary. And it is that outsider status that has endured, even as Mr. Trump has been twice elected president of the United States. The reason outsider status is so critical to Mr. Trump's hold on his voters is that disdain for elites and politicians remains sky high, especially among the MAGA faithful."

Kristen Soltis Anderson's full op-ed for the New York Times is available at this link (subscription required).

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