The 'MAGA revolution is eating its own': DC insider

The MAGA movement continues to experience a great deal of infighting over President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Trump is urging MAGA Republicans to move on from Epstein, even accusing those who are demanding the release of the alleged Epstein files of being "duped by Democrats." But in MAGA World, the controversy isn't going away.

In an article published by The Bulwark on July 28, journalist/author and Never Trump conservative Mona Charen cites the Epstein case as an example of how "the MAGA revolution is eating its own."

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After years of obsessing over conspiracy theories, Charen stresses, Trump can't realistically expect all MAGA Republicans to forget about Epstein.

"(FBI Director Kash) 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,'" explains Charen, who was a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s. "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."

Charen continues, "An authoritarian movement cannot demand acquiescence from a formerly liberty-preserving populace for just any old reason. It has to be an emergency…. 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."

Charen adds, "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."

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MAGA conspiracy theorists, Charen laments, claimed that Democrats were involved in Epstein's crimes but never produced any evidence to back up their claims — and now, Trump doesn't even want to talk about Epstein.

"To be clear," Charen writes, "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 (Clinton), 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."

Charen continues, "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…. 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 Trump crowd are."

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Mona Charen's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link (subscription required).