Why The Epstein Thing Is Different

The fear of cultural dethronement might not do the trick this time.

The MAGA base, as small and fervent as it is, long ago merged with Dear Leader like the mushroom zombies from The Last Of Us. Their pain is his pain. His pain is their pain. They move together, perfectly aligned in their pitch-black goals and aspirations and treating a threat against him as a threat against all. 

That merger between MAGA chud and Trump has melted away, at least partially, over the past couple weeks as officials in his regime scurry to bury the Epstein files and all the incriminating shit therein. It is the only time over the past decade of Trump’s political and cultural dominance that the zombies have questioned whether Dear Leader’s pain is indeed their own. Their fully-formed alternate reality has been penetrated by Trump’s refusal to expose the Epstein conspiracy that has functioned as a central hub in the American fascist narrative. Now the whole bad-faith right-wing edifice is shaking like a Jenga tower in the moments before the game ends. The chuds have realized all at once that years and years of pretending to care about sex trafficking and sexual abuse in order to ratfuck powerful people on the American left might have been for nothing.

MAGA truthers are telling Trump to pull the next Jenga piece and he won't do it. Let's move on to another game, he pleads. Why, they ask.

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Seemingly every Trump-worshipping fascist influencer over the past week has broken with their usual servitude and reverence and questioned why the Big Boy is being so damn cagey about this Epstein thing. More than a few far-right podcast hosts and writers have called for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s political head as a penance for the regime’s refusal to give us the goods on Epstein’s supposed list. Trump’s longwinded defense of Bondi – who just plays attorney general on TV, like Trump plays president only on TV – turned his usually-loving influencers against him in a way we have not seen. 

Ah, you say, but we have seen this play out. The far right broke with Trump bigly on the COVID vaccine back in 2020 and 2021, when Trump took full credit for the vaccine’s development and the large-scale effort to vaccinate folks against the killer virus. Trump understood the vaccine was politically popular, but not with his hardcore base, which saw the jab as a left-wing plot to Kill Us All or Make Us Robots or to Spread The Woke Mind Virus – whatever Aaron Rodgers thinks. 

His people booed him in 2021 when he rightly touted the COVID vaccine as a major accomplishment for his otherwise disastrous and clownish first administration. Driven by a burning desire to be loved and adored, Trump softened his stance on the vaccine as an unmitigated good by reminding people they had the right to refuse the vaccine and die of COVID if they felt that would sufficiently trigger the libs. The booing stopped. The cheering resumed. 

The Politics Of A Wood Chipper

Last year I wrote a follow-up to my maturely titled 2017 e-book, 69 Ways to Own The Libs. Owning The Libs Across America was an update on how right-wing media ecosystem had changed during the Trump years, and how the pandemic had completely altered the brain chemistry of every Republican

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

This time it’s different, or it feels different. The sustained vitriol aimed first at a high-ranking Trump lackey and then at Trump himself is unprecedented in his takeover of the Republican Party and his assault on the country. The vaccine skepticism faded after a while; Trump being out of office at the time meant the right could move on from their god’s role in the COVID shot development and train its vengeance on the doddering moderate Democrat who ousted Trump from office in 2020. Today, with Trump’s coverup of the Epstein files and his flailing on social media – begging his adherents to shut the fuck up about Epstein – there is no one else to blame. As he said shortly after winning re-election, he can make anything public, including the reams of Epstein documents that might expose dozens of the world’s most powerful people as child sex predators. 

The American right’s confusion about why Trump won’t release the files seems sincere. In the bad-faith reality they’ve carefully pieced together over the years, the Epstein files are filled only with the names of their enemies, of Democrats and rich libs and maybe anti-Trump Republicans and other members of the so-called globalist agenda. This is pure projection, as the American right has a pedophilia problem that goes beyond coincidence, in ways that are never acknowledged by mainstream media outlets afraid of Trump and his allies. But in the minds of right-wing social media influencers who have made their entire personalities about the Epstein conspiracy theory, there was – until now – no question that the files should be made public for all to see because the list was full of Democrats. It was to be the ultimate confirmation that they are and have been on the right side of history over the past decade, fighting for the children by electing alleged and convicted sexual assaulters to high office.

If Trump is on that list – and even a reasonable person might guess he is at this point in the Epstein proceedings – their entire world collapses. The Jenga pieces go everywhere. They will know – somehow for the first time in their miserable lives – that they are in fact the baddies.

For ten years Trump has been the all-powerful vehicle for the American right’s ferocious fight against marginalized groups they fear and loathe. Their pulsating fear of cultural dethronement – being usurped by different races or genders or sexualities – left them no choice, again and again, but to rally around Trump and beg him to do their dirty work, to exact pain and suffering on human beings who threatened their place in the hierarchy of oppression. And Trump has delivered every time.

It’s why his popularity jumps in times of personal peril: When he’s on trial for various crimes against the nation or sexual assault or when some kid shoots at him during a campaign rally, his people and folks on the political periphery whose fear of cultural dethronement is slightly less intense flock to Trump. He is their Last Stand against woke. When he's in trouble, they're all in trouble.

The more victimized Trump becomes, the stronger his bond becomes with Americans who see him as their living revenge against those who dared make their voices heard for a fleeting moment in the racial justice movement of 2020. The connection becomes ever stronger the more opposition and prosecution he faces, no matter how much he deserves to be opposed and prosecuted. The more danger, the more tightly woven they become.

We’re seeing the opposite happen with his refusal to play ball on the Epstein issue. He’s being pressured and perhaps victimized, but his pain this time around is not their pain. That’s because, I think, Trump’s inaction is the first real acknowledgment that his disciples have built their political house on sand. Suddenly, for the first time, they are feeling the foundation of their politics and worldview shift beneath their feet. They’re asking – begging – Trump to make that foundation solid once again by simply being transparent and exposing the pedophilia ring that was meant to bring down his opposition, once and for all. That he won’t, and that he keeps telling his most ardent worshippers to shut up about Epstein, has created an instability that Trump folks can’t tolerate. 

Take, for instance, the Arkansas man who told Trump on Truth Social that he drove to D.C. in January 2021 to help overthrow the U.S. government for Big Boy. He was among the thousands to joined the unprecedented effort to ratio Trump on his own social media platform for the first time. A man who had done the necessary mental gymnastics to convince himself that a lifelong sex pest was the one to expose an international sex trafficking ring logged on to say enough, I can't take any more of these contortions. I need you to go ahead and expose the Epstein bad guys or I'm out. Dewayne ain't alone.

No amount of Trump promising to ease their anxiety about cultural dethronement will soothe influential fascists and MAGA folks badgering the president about why exactly he's burying the Epstein files after years of pledging to release them to a public hungry to validate their worldview and the politics and their hatreds, so carefully cultivated. His reticence has raised questions that threaten an undeniably fragile political coalition.

Trump has tried via social media to promise once again that he will defend their place atop the American hierarchy as long as everyone stops talking about this whole Epstein thing. Stick by me and we can inflict even more suffering on those who are less human than us. Stick by me and we can return to a Glorious Past – we're almost there! That trick usually works. It hasn't worked this time.

Trump and his base are not as tightly woven as they were a week ago. Probably that connection will be looser in another week. Whatever happens next – however much they become untangled from each other – Trump will not have his usual weapon of grievance to keep his zombies in line. He'll have to come up with another trick to keep the Jenga tower from toppling. It's anyone's guess as to whether he has a second trick, or if he's ever considered one.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.