President Donald Trump’s devoted fanbase is accustomed to believing whatever he tells them, even blatantly false hoaxes — but he’s finally told them something that they can’t accept as true, wrote Michael Tomasky for The New Republic in an analysis published on Monday.
Specifically, Trump and those in his inner circle have done a complete 180 on the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, spending years asserting that there was some big conspiracy to protect scores of rich and powerful people who were supposedly implicated in a “client list.” Only for Attorney General Pam Bondi to clarify there is no “client list” and Epstein’s death in jail was indeed a suicide, which has kicked off fury from MAGA world and calls for Trump’s law enforcement team to resign — even as Trump himself begs his base to let it go.
Even a lot of far-right activists who will remain loyal to Trump see this as a black mark on his presidency, Tomasky wrote — and there’s a fundamental reason why.
“During his political career, Trump has promoted or endorsed every single nutso right-wing conspiracy theory he’s commented on. He’s even started a few of them. (Remember how Obama was spying on his campaign?) No conspiracy was too out there for him. This is a guy who thinks, or says he thinks, the 2020 election was stolen,” wrote Tomasky. “On top of that, he fed the Epstein conspiracists enough table scraps to keep that story humming along, too. He said on the campaign trail that he’d be inclined to make all related government files public.”
His base couldn’t wait, convinced the FBI was sitting on troves of evidence implicating liberal celebrities and Democratic politicians in child trafficking — only for it all to be shut down and Trump and his Justice Department to say there was nothing there.
As a result, Tomasky wrote, Trump supporters are scrambling to look for a reason for this change of heart — and some are only just discovering the fact that Trump and Epstein had a friendship decades ago.
“There may well be no ‘client list’ per se. But there is almost assuredly a trove of evidence that was seized by the FBI when they raided Epstein’s estate. Are those photos in the FBI’s possession? Are others? What additional information might the bureau be sitting on pertaining to Epstein and Trump?” wrote Tomasky. It could end up truly being nothing, he added. “But certainly, far from being a piece of conspiratorial conjecture, the notion that Trump’s name appears unflatteringly in those files would serve as the Occam’s Razor explanation as to why he is now eager to kill the Epstein story.”
The upshot, he concluded, is that “Trump, MAGA, and the whole right-wing ecosphere have never not been on the same page here—from Hillary and Russia to Wikileaks to the Biden Crime Family to 60 Minutes being in bed with Kamala. There’s never been an inch of daylight between them. Now there is. Will all of MAGA-land desert Trump? Of course not. Will they rally to his side the next time he really locks horns with the deep state? Sure. But there’s a leak in the dike now. MAGA elements are feeling a little bit of the mistrust that those of us in the real world have long harbored about Trump.”