Trump’s base feels humiliated because they were played for suckers — and they know it

The good news is that Democrats have found the wedge issue that can shatter the MAGA coalition.

The bad news is that it’s Jeffrey Epstein.

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell focus-grouped 2024 Trump voters who are disillusioned with Trump over the notorious FBI/Department of Justice memo that effectively closed the Epstein case.

The memo made it clear that they will not be releasing any more documents or pursuing cases against Epstein’s friends. It declared that there was no client list, no jailhouse murder, and no international blackmail ring.

This is all true, but to the QAnon base, it’s akin to the Pope tweeting, “We’ve reviewed the files and Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Thank you for your attention in this matter.”

There’s no coming back from that.

MAGA’s headed for schism.

Longwell asked the group whether they thought Trump cynically hyped the Epstein story or whether he was in on the conspiracy.

Overwhelmingly, they thought Trump was in on it.

This is a potentially explosive finding.

Normally, it’s impossible to get Trump supporters to believe that Trump has ever made the slightest misstep, but here we have former MAGA's declaring that The Donald’s in league with ultimate evil.

Longwell understands how central Epstein is to the MAGA worldview. The base expects the Epstein files to fulfill prophecies broadcast on rightwing radio in the 1990s and elaborated through Pizzagate and QAnon. It was foretold that Bill and Hillary Clinton and all the Satanic Democrats would one day be exposed for their crimes against God and man.

To reasonable people, the Epstein saga is an outrage, but not a world historical event. To us, he was a degenerate billionaire who raped girls with his rich friends, dodged taxes and loved eugenics. To MAGA, however, Epstein was a leader of the Jewish Cabal that runs the world.

For us, exposing Epstein’s confederates would undercut elite impunity and deliver justice to victims. For them, it would expose the Illuminati.

According to QAnon theology, Trump is on a divine mission to fight the cabal of the deep state. To many, Trump’s willingness to hunt down Epstein’s co-conspirators is a test. If he won’t do it, he’s not the Chosen One. As far as they’re concerned, Trump deserves to be our supreme leader because QAnon says so.

By implying that the globalist Epstein conspiracy isn’t real, Trump is undermining his own authority. Trump ran on exposing the Epstein files as part of his campaign against the deep state. Key members of his government like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino built their careers on it.

The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated. They were played for suckers and they know it. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” status anxiety is an accelerant for conspiratorial thinking. People gravitate towards conspiracy theories when they feel insecure. It’s a special affront, then, to be treated with contempt by the very people who were supposed to salve their egos.

Attorney General Pam Bondi humiliated some of MAGA’s favorite far-right influencers by meeting them at a much-hyped event at the White House and presenting them with binders full of what she implied would be blockbuster secrets. In fact, the binders contained information that had been public for years. Then she left them to explain to their angry fans why there were no secrets in those binders. Bondi stalled by claiming that the Epstein client list was on her desk.

Now even Daddy Trump is yelling at MAGA to stop talking about Epstein. Bongino and Patel allegedly co-wrote the infamous Nothing to See Here memo. It appears these career conspiracists were more than willing to brush the Epstein files under the rug until the backlash hit. The Epstein bait-and-switch is proof that not even the conspiracists’ most ardent and well-compensated champions in Washington care about them.

Some Democrats are hesitant to fan the flames of this scandal because they’re afraid of legitimizing conspiracy theories. That’s a valid concern. This saga has moved QAnon to the very center of our politics – even more than the antics of the QAnon Shaman at the J6 insurrection or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career.

However, there are also reality-based reasons to be up-in-arms about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein saga. There’s an opportunity for congressional Democrats to demand meaningful transparency on the Epstein case. The key is to stick to legitimate grievances, namely Trump’s broken promises, lies and conflicts of interest.

The DOJ-FBI memo claims that there are no more releasable documents. The FBI’s Epstein files are probably about 1 percent as interesting as people expect, but the government is lying about what they have. They say that there’s only child porn and material that would expose the identities of victims. However, we know from lawyers who worked on Epstein lawsuits for years that there’s plenty of material that could be safely redacted and released. There’s probably no client list per se, because Epstein wasn’t running a bordello and blackmail is the wrong model to understand what he was up to. The men who came to the island were friends, not customers. Epstein surely collected kompromat on them, but the FBI may not have gotten a hold of much of it. Epstein had years of advance warning that he might be charged and he had IT pros to help him hide it.

Initially, Bondi had agents working around the clock to gather materials from footlockers and hard drives in far-flung FBI field offices. This is material that presumably wasn’t available to the Biden-era DOJ. We were supposed to get huge revelations any day. Then suddenly they put out a memo saying there’s nothing to see. It’s fair to ask what changed.

There’s also a glaring conflict of interest. Depending on how you define the Epstein files, Trump is already all over them. Epstein’s black book, which has been public for years, contains 20 different ways to reach Trump and his household. He rode on Epstein’s plane. In fact, Trump and Epstein were best friends for over a decade. Their friendship was largely based on chasing girls.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told Landon Thomas, Jr. of New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In the early 1990s, Trump flew in 28 models for a “beauty contest” where he and Epstein were the only guests. Trump appointed the US attorney who gave Epstein his notorious and illegal federal immunity deal to be his first-term secretary of labor. Epstein died on Trump’s watch. Let’s not forget that Trump is an adjudicated rapist in his own right. Elon Musk’s accusation that Trump is in the Epstein files may have finally given MAGA a permission structure to take this mountain of evidence seriously.

Astonishingly, Trump recently declared on Truth Social that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” which is tantamount to admitting that there are Epstein files with derogatory information about him. Whereupon, the president was ratioed on his own platform for the first time in Truth Social history.

I wouldn’t count on Trump to have a good handle on what’s in the files. He’s lazy and senile, after all. But something seems to have spooked him. Perhaps it’s just that the inexplicable force field that shielded Trump from the consequences of his well-known ties to Epstein is starting to crack and he wants to change the subject before it shatters entirely. Whatever it is, Longwell’s focus-groupers can sense it.

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