The Epstein Case Is Different

MAGA Might Forgive. They Will Never Forget

Trump once said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any fans, and he's spent the last ten years proving himself correct. Scandal after scandal, catastrophic fuckups that would end any other political career: again and again, he blusters his way out with his base fully intact.

And every time one of those scandals breaks, journalists write some version of the same article. Trump is done. Cooked. Washed. No way can he recover from this. I wrote one in late 2022, when Trump started pushing NFTs, and I was as wrong as everyone else. Teflon be damned: Trump is made of adamantium.

For the first 9.5 years of our current cursed era, people fell hard for these articles. But after Trump’s reelection and subsequent destruction of American checks, balances, institutions, and basic human decency, something snapped within our collective consciousness. People have swung the opposite way. Nothing can stop Trump. No scandal is too big, no betrayal too deep, no policy fallout devastating enough to jeopardize his continued, eternal survival.

But that’s not true either. Trump could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any fans, it’s true. But there are other things Trump cannot do, and he’s just done one of them.

A lot of people left of center are confused by the conservative outrage over Trump’s insistence that the Epstein client list is a hoax. Medicaid cuts, classified data shared on Signal, tariff price fluctuations, the sight of neighbors thrown into unmarked vans by masked men in paramilitary gear, but Epstein is where they draw the line?

Yes. Absolutely yes. Here’s why:

Cast your mind back over these last few years: what are the most common insults leveled against the liberal enemy? Groomer. Degenerate. Pedophile. Librarians who allow books that mention the existence of gay people? Pedophiles. Drag queens reading books to children? Groomers. Pride parades? Gender affirming care? Gay men with kids? Pedophile, pedophile, pedophile. Multiple Republicans running for office in California last year ran ads linking their Democratic oponents to grooming and pedophilia. Public schools, Disney, PBS: all accused of endorsing or facilitating heinous, unforgivable crimes.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules,” Christina Pushaw, Press Secretary for Ron DeSantis, posted in defense of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

“Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics,” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted in April 2022, then doubled down on 60 Minutes a full year later.

QAnon prepared ground for the narrative, and would-be masterminds like Chris Rufo pushed it hard. Now it’s got a chokehold on the movement. A 2022 poll found that half of all Republicans believe Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Another poll, also from 2022, found that one in every four Republicans believes the QAnon narrative that their political enemies are part of an elite Satan-worshipping global sex trafficking cabal. That’s enough to sway an election and then some.

Evangelical Christians overlap heavily with QAnon in both ideology and belief. They really think God chose Trump to lead the righteous into battle against demonic forces of darkness. For them, Trump’s obvious sins and imperfections don’t read as an indictment or even as a negative. They stand as proof of God’s eternal glory, his ability to take an “imperfect vessel” and use it to to carry out His will.

From the casual culture warrior to the conspiracy-pilled soldier of God, MAGA believe that Republicans must #SaveTheChildren from the abusive clutches of the pedophilic Democrats. This fundamental conflict guarantees their status as good guys — no matter what depths their fellow travellers or their leaders sink to, they’re still better than child rapists. It’s an essential link in the chain that holds MAGA’s unstable coalition together. Even if they find some substitute link, the bonds are now weakened permanently

The signs of crisis are everywhere. For those not terminally online: the term “ratio” refers to posts that have more comments than likes — unusual, since more social media users “like” posts and move on than bother to leave a comment. A ratio indicates a very unpopular post, and so it is with lingering shock that I tell you that, last Saturday, Trump got ratio’d on TruthSocial. The hugbox. The platform that exists exclusively to tell Trump how wonderful he is. You can see some of the almost universally negative responses to his demand that supporters “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about” here. It’s really quite something.

In the best indication yet that Trump has, in fact, gone senile, he failed to read the room and doubled down again on Wednesday:

Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years…Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Holy shit.

Last night, the Wall Street Journal published a letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday, back in 2002: not some liberal rag or fly-by-night tabloid but a solid, respectable paper that does solid, respectable journalism (even if their opinion page is staffed entirely by psychos). The letter involves a crude drawing of a naked woman and the line “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The letter doesn’t sound much like Trump’s signature social media style (which makes sense, it’s a letter to a friend not a tweet to the world). Republican influencers like Steve Bannon are using that discrepancy to redirect the base’s anger towards the Democrats for slandering their beloved leader like this. Trump also told Bondi to work on releasing sealed grand jury documents, which has calmed tempers somewhat. The climax of this outrage has passed, for now.

But the rage itself remains. The subreddit r/conservative is notorious for banning any opinion that diverges from the MAGA worldview. At time of writing, all the top-voted replies on their general Epstein thread are either seriously considering the possibility that Trump might be on the list or simply demanding the release of Epstein’s client list. Replies defending Trump are being downvoted into oblivion. Truth Social is back to being a hugbox, but the positive replies are generic memes with little to no text: either people changed their minds overnight or the platform is nerfing dissent.

Now what?

Barring further revelations, MAGA will likely appear to move on over the next few days and weeks. Turning on Trump would involve rethinking a core part of their identity, and that kind of shift takes time. They still believe the Democrats are evil. They still believe the left wants to destroy America. For now, it’s enough.

But Trump’s words have shaken MAGA’s faith on a fundamental level. For the first time, they are seriously questioning, out loud, whether Trump is actually the avatar of justice they’ve looked up to all this time. The seal is now broken. The second moment of doubt will be easier, the third will be easier still. As Trump’s policies inevitably lead to recession, scarcity, and hardship, there will be many such moments. As they happen, we’ll start to see results.

Our chances of recovery as a nation are orders of magnitude higher today than they were two weeks ago. Trump has committed one of the largest, strangest, and stupidest unforced errors in American history. MAGA may forgive their leader, for now…but they will not forget.