The president is trying to change the subject after the attorney general closed the case on disgraced financier and Jeffrey Epstein. That’s why Donald Trump has lately been harping on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Someone is to blame for some makebelieve problem and Trump wants to be seen as the solution.
But even if Trump were able to redirect the press corps’ attention, he is unlikely to change the dynamics under way among the MAGA faithful. Trump says Powell must go so that interest rates fall, but to the extent that MAGA base was ever motivated by inflation or the cost of living, it was a secondary concern. MAGA’s principal motivation is drawn from a cosmic story about the battle between good and evil, and with the Epstein scandal, Trump has raised doubts about which side he’s on.
Which story? QAnon. It’s the belief that Donald Trump is the epic hero in a secret war against powerful and malevolent (and Jewish) conspirators who have plotted with agents in the government (the deep state), corporations (wokeness) and the media (lies) to sabotage America. The end of the story was supposed to come when Trump released the Epstein files in advance of executing God’s enemies.
But when US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that there was no list and no conspiracy, she said, in effect, that “the prophecy” was phony. As Lindsay Beyerstein memorably put it: “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.’”
Something about QAnon that’s important to bear in mind is that lots of people have served it to become rich and influential, which is to say, lots of people have cynically exploited antisemitic fear and paranoia to create a gigantic rightwing media apparatus that has been able to shield the president from feeling the consequences of virtually all of his choices, not matter how destructive they might be, even to MAGA.
Another thing to bear in mind is that Trump decided to bring into his administration some of these self-same people who have gotten rich and influential telling and retelling the story about Trump being the hero who is going to save the world and make America great again.
Two of them are Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Dan Bongino, the FBI’s deputy director. They were reportedly in agreement with Bondi’s decision to close the Epstein case, but once they understood fully the incendiary backlash against it, they apparently chickened out. Bondi forced them to choose between loyalty to Trump and loyalty to the true believers of “the prophecy,” which is to say, she forced them to choose between a “false prophet” and their lucrative media careers. (I don’t know about Patel, but Bongino is reportedly looking for an exit.)
This is the source of the division among the MAGA faithful, between a political leader who, over a decade, rode a rising tide of conspiracy theory – from birtherism to Pizzagate to the stop the steal – and a tightly-knit group of rightwing operatives, some of them are funded by the governments of Russia and Iran, who rode that tide along with him.
United, they could bend the will of the Washington press corps and prevent any scandal from truly taking root, up to and including an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government.
Divided, however, the president is badly exposed.
One way Trump diverts attention away from his incompetence, indecency and criminality is to accuse the media of being “the enemy of the people,” knowing his conspiracy-minded followers will interpret that to mean reporters are an extension of a Satan-worshiping pedophiliac cabal that’s plotting to destroy America and God’s chosen.
But now, he risks feeling the consequences of every choice. If he does indeed sack Jerome Powell, it will trigger a global reaction, the result of which will almost certainly drive up the cost of everything, including the cost of money, making borrowing and credit that much harder to get. His followers won’t complain about that explicitly, but they may do so implicitly – channeling their hardship through a proper MAGA lens.
As Lindsay Beyerstein insightfully told me, there is now a “permission structure” in place so the president’s followers can criticize him in “MAGA-coded way.” “Lashing out against the tariffs or the massive cuts to Medicaid makes you a RINO or ‘woke’ in their eyes,” she said. “But lashing out at Donald Trump in the name of Jeffrey Epstein’s child victims and the war on the deep state makes you a better, purer MAGA.”
Those victims, by the way, represent an entry point into the MAGA movement for Republicans who are squeamish about being associated with the kooks and cranks of QAnon. As one reader put it this morning: “There’s a more ‘centrist’ element to MAGA that entered into the movement with legitimate concerns about child trafficking. All those ‘report trafficking’ signs you find in bathrooms are a product of their work. So Trump’s dismissal of Epstein is a slap in their faces, too.”
New polling underscores this and suggests the backlash against Trump is far from isolated to the 20 percent of MAGA that’s diehard for QAnon. “Sixty-nine of respondents thought the federal government was hiding details about Epstein's clients,” Reuters said, “compared to 6 percent who disagreed and about one in four who said they weren't sure.”
The number of Republicans?
Nearly two-thirds, or 62 percent, agreed.
The MAGA movement has never held Donald Trump responsible for this choices, no matter how outrageous or illegal or treasonous they have been, because he convinced them that he and they are the real victims of a real conspiracy perpetrated by the greatest of evildoers, namely, a covert confederacy of scum and perversion that sells children for sex to seemingly untouchable men, like George Soros and Barack Obama.
So even though Trump was actually convicted of committing actual crimes against actual victims, in the eyes of MAGA, he remained the real victim of a much larger crime committed by much larger criminal forces that he, and only he, could bring to justice once elected.
That was the subtext beneath Donald Trump Jr’s question posed before the election. “How is it that my father can be convicted of 34 crimes, but no one on Epstein’s list has even been brought to light?” And that has been the subtext behind virtually every effort by Trump to draw attention away from the consequences of his choices.
The difference, now that he has tried to dismiss the Epstein case of nothing to see, is that the MAGA base can no longer be relied on to fill in the blanks. He wants them to believe that the evil doers are trying to persecute him over Epstein the way they persecuted him over Russia, but he can’t equate “the Russia hoax” with “the Epstein hoax” without also inadvertently admitting to the base that MAGA has been a scam.
That seems to be what Nick Fuentes has concluded. “When we look back on the history of populism in America, we are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history, and the liberals were right,” the former Trump supporter and white supremacist said on his latest podcast. “The MAGA supporters were had. They were."
He added: “The Republicans must be hanged in the midterms. … It just needs to be a Democrat avalanche at this point. That’s not because I’m a Democrat. I don’t like the Democrats. I hate the Republicans more. Because the Republicans are traitors. Because I have voted for Republicans. I have supported Republicans. And they shit on our face.”
The essence of MAGA is faith. No matter what it looks like – no matter how scary or chaotic or costly or wrong things may seem – you must doubt the evidence of your eyes. Donald Trump was sent by God to fulfill a prophecy, or at least punish those whom MAGA believes deserve pain. But now the evidence of your eyes is looking more dependable.
Trump has never been held accountable.
But every con meets its end.