What will it take for MAGA to abandon Trump?
The Epstein matter provides a clue
In the first serious sign of the fragility of the movement Trump has built, the issues around the Epstein files have emerged as the one matter that Trump hasn’t been able to gloss over with a few well-placed social media posts.
Why is that?
The answer is completely fascinating I think, and it speaks to all the deepest issues about how a movement like MAGA springs into life in the first place and then maintains itself in the face of all opposition.
I’ll get into those underlying reasons, but one matter we can’t overlook is that although the story around Epstein has been manipulated in the usual culture-war way by various rightwing groups, and has all the hallmarks of unreality that mark other Trump-related conspiracies, such as QAnon or the recent chemtrails nonsense, the fact remains that this story isn’t made up from whole cloth.
We shouldn’t forget this: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ran an actual paedophile ring and both of them—and their “friends”—engaged in the abuse of children. This is not just some concocted story, the facts of which can be changed on a whim to deal with shifts in public opinion or in the face of concerted questioning, the usual Trump methodology. Crimes were committed. They were prosecuted under Trump’s own Department of Justice.
Nonetheless, fabrication is at the heart of what is currently unfolding.
There is a separate point to make: the horrific crimes involved in the Epstein matter are not necessarily what is causing MAGA to fracture. It isn’t at all clear to me that what has them upset is that Trump himself may have been one of the people on Epstein list and thus, potentially, part of the crimes that took place. There has always been a reasonable possibility of Trump’s complicity or involvement, but it hadn’t caused this level of concern.
This is in part because, as an incredible piece in Common Dreams documents, MAGA and the conservative movement more generally aren’t averse to what most of us would think of as child exploitation. For a start, underage marriage—with very slight caveats—is legal in 37 of the states of the Union. Thirty-seven! As the article notes, this isn’t a bug: it is a feature of belief system that, by design, sacrifices young women and children on an altar of institutional abuse:
[T]he Epstein file was never the point. The real story was not buried in a locked safe or hidden by the FBI. It was out in the open. It is still out in the open. The political movement that once pledged to drain the swamp has spent its second tour of duty building a legal and bureaucratic fortress around some of the oldest crimes in the book. Modern conservatism has come to rely not just on outrage but on inertia, and nowhere is that more visible than in its handling of child sexual abuse.
We are not talking about a secret ring or coded pizza menus. We are talking about a system that tolerates child marriage in over half the states. A system that forces raped minors to carry pregnancies to term. A system that slashes funding for shelters and trauma counseling. A system that lets rape kits pile up in warehouse back rooms while politicians pose in front of billboards about protecting kids.
This is not a moral failure or a bureaucratic oversight. It is an architecture.
Still, something has changed, and Epstein is the point.
MAGA, like other populist movements in history that attach themselves to “strong men” leaders, gain their strength from a belief system fabricated within and between a set of beliefs that elevates a fantasy conception of the world—their world, their nation—to the level of reality.
In Nazi Germany, the sustaining myth Hitler created was known as Volksgemeinschaft. “This new community,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “tentatively realized in the Nazi movement in the pretotalitarian atmosphere, was based on the absolute equality of all Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference from all other people.”
In this sense, Volksgemeinschaft, and then later, Nazism, isn’t strictly speaking nationalistic. “The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation-state,” Arendt argues, “and they repeated time and again that their ‘movement,’ international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory.”
Whether this is true of MAGA is an interesting question, but it does help explain the contempt they have for their founding document, or the rule of law more generally, and it does explain the way in which MAGA is constructed on a vision that predates the full realisation of the state itself. You can see that in images like this, posted by the Department of Homeland Security a few days ago:
Ultimately, Arendt makes the key point about the nature of this fantasy world:
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 460). Kindle Edition.
It is Trump’s inconsistency in handling the Epstein matter that has tripped him up and caused MAGA to implode. The MAGA fantasy can sustain lies and survive changes of directions and changes of facts, but once that underlying consistency is breached, the walls come tumbling down.
Like Volksgemeinschaft or even Nazism, MAGA is all about exclusivity. It has strict, if opaque, rules of membership and is built on exclusion. That’s why it isn’t really a nationalist movement and why it certainly rejects any concept like citizenship where you can simply swear allegiance to a document. Membership goes much deeper than that and it is why MAGA is so unmoved by citizens being deported in ICE raids. MAGA is not the Republic. It might in some sense be America, but it isn’t the United States.
Put simply, Trump’s one job is to maintain and embody this MAGA myth. Any advantage he derives for himself, no matter how criminally or unfairly obtained, doesn’t matter to his supporters: in fact, such advantages enhance his claim on their support. It is a version of what Tocqueville’s writes of in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. It was only after the aristocracy lost their privileges and power that the peasants decided they really hated them.
“Aristocracies, which possess not merely privileges, but actual power, which govern and administer public affairs,” Tocqueville argues, “may exercise private rights of great magnitude without attracting much attention.” But once that power—the actual reason for their existence, is gone, so is their support. “If the nobility possessed inconvenient privileges and exacted onerous duties, it secured public order, administered justice, executed the laws, succored the weak, managed public affairs. It was when it ceased to do these things that the burden of its privileges began to be felt, and its very existence became inexplicable.”
Trump becomes inexplicable to MAGA once he stops being the lynchpin of their controlling fantasy, and that is what their outburst over Epstein represents.
Until now, Trump has presented himself as the cure for the Deep State and all its deceptions, the figure who embodies the truth that is at the heart of their crisscrossing belief systems, the strap that bound it all together. As Emily Bell wrote at the Colombia Journalism Review this week, the “seeds of the Epstein obsession were sown by the QAnon conspiracists who believed that Trump was in fact Q, the messiah who would save the world from an evil ring of liberal child abusers.”
Revealing the “truth” about Epstein was central to the MAGA/Volksgemeinschaft fantasy, so once it became clear that Trump wasn’t going to release the Epstein papers and pursue the conspiracy theories around his death, MAGA snapped, as Bell notes:
[T]he news of no news threw President Trump’s base into turmoil, because conspiracy theories around a Democratic “deep state” cover-up of the Epstein files were for years stoked by some of Trump’s most prominent deputies. MAGA online influencers, stung by betrayal, led nonstop viral coverage of the fallout on all platforms. Trump was brutally ratioed by his followers on his own social media platform, Truth Social, for suggesting that their obsession with the Epstein files was misplaced. One of his posts—“We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and 'selfish people' are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein”—generated more than forty-eight thousand replies, many of them angry or confused.
It is the confusion that is key here; and it is such confusion that will be Trump’s epitaph, if it comes to that.
As I write this, it isn’t clear how much damage Trump’s inconsistency over Epstein has done to his overall project, but the MAGA reaction indicates that concern runs deep. This means that, for those who want to bring Trump down, there is a huge lesson to learn: what might finally work isn’t pointing out that he is a hypocrite or a liar or even a criminal: as he himself said, with more insight than most, he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.”
The thing that will bring Trump down is forcing him into actions that challenge the underlying consistency of the fantasy he has constructed for his followers and for himself. Only in that inconsistency will MAGA finally abandon him.1
And sure, that might get rid of Trump, but American democracy is so hollowed out at this point that getting rid of Trump is unlikely to solve the bigger problem. But we can deal with that happy thought in a future newsletter.
Very thoughtfully argued and researched, Tim. Trump, desperate to kill the discussion as he has so successfully done before, makes it worse for himself. This one will unstick him. I hope.
An excellent article. Thank you.