Donald Trump’s political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the President seriously, but not literally. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020 election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, as he was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging—the White House likely assumed that the magaverse would simply move on, as it had so many times before. The surprise—one that, two weeks in, Trump has still not been able to quell—is that it didn’t.
Squirming, the President has tried to dismiss the uproar (“Are people still talking about this guy?”) and to blame it, somehow, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the Democrats’ “new SCAM”). More unexpectedly, he has called those in his own base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid,” lamenting that “my PAST SUPPORTERS have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.” But that has been just blood in the water, both to the Democrats who are now calling for the full release of the Epstein files and to the anonymous Republican strategists who have begun to warn of a drop in turnout in the midterms.
Among Trump’s aides, one theory was that his team had erred in promising not just vibes and insinuation, as he normally does, but something to which he is generally allergic: hard evidence. The details of Epstein’s life—the formidable connections he cultivated among political, financial, and academic élites; his conviction in Florida in 2008 for solicitation of prostitution; the way he avoided more serious punishment—have been exhaustively documented. But the maga fixation was that the government had participated in a coverup and had in its possession a list of Epstein’s clients, which could, the theory went, implicate scores of the powerful in heinous crimes. Last October, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list.” In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded to a question about whether the Justice Department would soon make public the “list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients” by saying it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Fifteen right-wing influencers had gone to the White House and were given binders titled “Epstein Files: Phase One.” But those “files” offered nothing new.
To Trump’s allies in the right-wing media, many of whom had been predicting spectacular revelations about Epstein for years, this seemed like a dodge. “The fact that the U.S. government, the one I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, ‘Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist,’ was too much for me,” Tucker Carlson said. Megyn Kelly posted on X that there were only two possibilities: that there was no client list and Bondi had misled the public or that “there is a scandal that’s being covered up & it’s at his”—Trump’s—“direction.” Steve Bannon estimated that the backlash would cost Republicans forty seats in the House of Representatives next year. That last prediction is probably worth taking seriously, but not literally.
More interesting was the reaction among Trump’s most recent allies: the Silicon Valley billionaires and the podcast bros who were key to his win in 2024. Elon Musk has been making gleeful accusations against Trump for weeks. The comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz complained, “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” Joe Rogan, among the most important of Trump’s allies in November, now sounded betrayed: “Why’d they say there was thousands of hours of tape of people doing horrible shit? Why’d they say that?”
Trump is vulnerable to the Epstein case, and not only because the two men were photographed partying together, or because Trump praised Epstein in a quote that was widely circulated, or because Epstein had told the reporter Michael Wolff that, for ten years, he had been the President’s “closest friend.” (Trump eventually said that they had had a “falling out.”) On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, Trump, among others, sent him a “bawdy” birthday letter, which Trump denied, saying that he would sue the Journal, “just like I sued everyone else.” Liberals, taking all this in, might suspect that it’s a simple comeuppance for Trump’s political choices: if you build a following on the internet fringe, you can become beholden to its obsessions. But the uproar also has to do with the ways in which the Trump movement has evolved.
In the post-pandemic atmosphere of fury and distrust, Trump moved much more nimbly than the Democrats to expand his support among people who are only irregularly interested in politics, and he has reached a group that is young, nonwhite, male, and less likely to have a college degree. That group, and the podcasters whom they supply with an audience, has seemed drawn to Trump’s persona as an outsider, an inveigher against the establishment. And yet, in the six months since the Inauguration, what Trump, despite adopting a cruel and autocratic style, has given them are Republican establishment policies: a budget that cuts Medicaid, stripping seventeen million people of health insurance, and gives huge tax breaks to the rich; a military intervention in the Middle East. A CNN poll released on Wednesday suggests that the number of Americans who “approve strongly” of Trump’s Presidency—one measure of his base—is now at its lowest of any point in his first and second terms.
No wonder Trump sounds so exasperated. (On Thursday, he said that Bondi would produce “any and all” grand-jury testimony from Epstein’s case, though this seems unlikely to satisfy anyone.) The central illusion of his political career has been that, despite his wealth and evident clout, he remains an outsider. But that was always a fiction, and now—with the G.O.P. leadership unified behind him and the Supreme Court mostly backing him—he may feel strong enough to leave some of his movement’s weirdness behind. Second-term Trump is no longer acting as a populist, and the Epstein case is unfolding as a test of how maga responds to this news. ♦
