President Trump once famously quipped that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and his strongest supporters would stay with him. For nearly a decade this has seemed true, but today, the president may have stumbled on the exception, in the sickening form of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
It turns out that Epstein is a major test for Trump in the eyes of his MAGA warriors. They want real answers from this administration, not fumbled document dumps and dismissive comments from the president himself, as we saw this week.
Now, we have FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino who is apparently threatening to resign over the debacle, if Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t go first and a bewildered MAGA base that feels it is being insulted and lied to by its government, again.
To be sure, Epstein was an awful human being who preyed on poor underage girls for decades, according to testimony from the Ghislane Maxwell trial (which I covered in the courthouse), as well as a wealth of other evidence. But for most Americans, his crimes and suspicious death are a mere curiosity at this point.
It is much, much more for hard-core MAGA. For them, it is nothing less than a test to determine whether or not the Swamp that has lied to our faces for decades is still in control.
This week, Steve Bannon said the only way the Epstein story goes away is if ‘the 5 to 10 to 15 percent of the Trump movement, the Pepes and hardcores,’ finally just say, ‘I’ve had enough of it.’ He added that the basic question is, ‘who is running the country?’
Likewise, at the TPUSA convention in Florida this weekend, which is led by Trump ally Charlie Kirk and is as pure a distillation of the core MAGA movement as exists, my sources tell me that Epstein is very much the top topic of concern.
But why did this curious case of this infamous creep and his private island become a synecdoche for all government lies in the mind of MAGA? In other words, how did Epstein become the symbol of deep government corruption?
For one thing, the notion Epstein was allowed to kill himself inside a federal prison has always strained credulity. From missing video to conflicting medical exams, there have been legitimate questions about how a man rumored to have damaging information on powerful people and ties to the intelligence community could turn up dead in federal custody. While officials assured the nation there was nothing to see, MAGA seethed. ‘Epstein didn’t kill himself’ became not just a meme and a mantra, but a declaration that we’ve been gaslit by our government.
There is also the matter of Bondi seeming to indicate that there was an Epstein client list in a Fox News Channel interview, only to now say it doesn’t exist. She says she was talking about the file writ large, but it didn’t sound that way at the time.
Bongino, in recent weeks, along with FBI Director Kash Patel, told us that a video from the prison is proof positive that this was suicide, but it turns out there was a missing minute of footage, and the video may have been doctored.
This was after Bondi all but hijacked a group of influencers in the spring at the White House, handing out binders purporting to share new bombshell information that turned out to be as exciting as a list of grandma’s baking recipes.
On top of all of this, we have President Trump himself, visibly annoyed in the White House, this week when asked about Epstein, ‘Are you still talking about this guy…this creep?’ Trump asked. Well, yes, Mr. President, they are.
All in all, the administration’s handling of the Epstein case has been about as transparent as a brick wall, one that appears to be crumbling.
Trump has expressed concern in the past about innocent people being listed in Epstein documents, as happened to attorney Alan Dershowitz and others, and according to Elon Musk, both Trump and Bannon appear in this evidence, though Musk offers no proof of this.
This may be a reasonable concern, but after decades of blatant lies and stalled prosecutions of Epstein, Trump’s hardcore supporters want more than assurances. They want to see the documents. They want to see everything.
And this is a central part of Trump’s appeal, his promise to open up the hood and expose the broken-down, deep-state engine of government. But promises are not enough. Where are the results? When are we going to Fort Knox as promised, for example?
A breathtaking hallmark of the second Trump term has been extreme transparency. The president takes questions almost daily, and answers with candor. Except, it seems, when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein.
For a quarter-century now, the Epstein case has been a combustible cocktail of power, greed, private islands and sexual abuse. It has ushered in both careful examination and wild conspiracy theories, and the only way to separate the two is with complete sunlight onto the evidence.
For President Trump, this may be the first time he is risking the loyalty of his longest, strongest supporters, and for a populist political movement that is pure poison.
The time to release everything is now, the future of MAGA may depend on it.