1). “Whitney Webb EXPOSES Epstein as Israel’s Agent”, Jul 19, 2025, Katie Halper interviews Whitney Webb, The Katie Halper Show, duration of video 11:14, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “Paul Craig Roberts: Trump’s Biggest Mistake - The Epstein Saga”, Jul 14, 2025, Nima Alkhorshid interviews Paul Craig Roberts, Dialogue Works, duration of video 49:09, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
3). “Epstein, Donald Trump and Sexual Blackmail Networks (w/ Nick Bryant) | The Chris Hedges Report”, Jul 16, 2025, Chris Hedges interviews Nick Bryant, The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel, duration of video 1:02:28, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
4). “MAGA Was Made a Promise, Now They Are in Revolt, Prof. David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize Author”, Jul 15, 2025, Mark Thompson interviews David Cay Johnston, The Mark Thompson Show, duration of video 35:24, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
5). “All the Epstein's men - The Grayzone live”, Jul 17, 2025, Max Blumenthal & Aaron Mate discuss the spreading effects of the Epstein Files, The Grayzone, duration of video 2:26:17, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
6). “Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein | The Ezra Klein Show”, Jul 18, 2025, Ezra Klein interviews Will Sommer, The Ezra Klein Show, duration of video 1:10:14, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
7). “In the conspiracy-addled mind of maga, Trump was supposed to defeat evil. By closing the Epstein case, he has become it”, Jul 16, 2025, John Stoehr, The Editorial Board, at < https://www.editorialboard.
8). “Maga’s headed for schism: The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated, writes Lindsay Beyerstein”, Jul 14, 2025, Lindsay Beyerstein, The Editorial Board, at < https://www.editorialboard.
Introduction: For a large, but mostly impotent and disorganized opposition to the Trumpian Fascist Takeover, the recent emergence of the “Epstein Files”, as an issue that is causing significant damage to the MAGA / Trump movement, is a timely gift in the flow of events and developments. Understanding the intricacies of the Trumpian MAGA movement with its many flows and eddies is a project I am not about to take on. But I think it is fair to say that the 2026 mid-term elections might still be fair and honest enough that a massive level of skepticism and doubt that discouraged MAGA voters could be important. Despite attempts to quash criticism of the sexual outrages in which Epstein was clearly involved, the MAGA faithful include many people who do not think the outrages have been seriously dealt with. Some among them know that the FBI seized around 360 Gigabytes of videos recording sexual acts, much of it between adult men and girls as young as 12 or 13 years old. Even more horrifying are reports of finding and grooming girls as young as 9 years old for sexual use at the earliest age possible. Of course, the great majority of the incriminating video material was removed by powerful forces before any journalist or investigator ever saw any of it; these are operatives who don't want this material to be seen randomly by the U.S. population. MAGA Epstein Conspiracy Theory adherents dream of seeing Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with any number of other Democrats, perp walked and executed; but would be appalled were Trump to be seriously implicated in Epstein's operations, perhaps to the point of making Trump ineffective in his role as leader of the far-right. A view from the progressive side of U.S. politics is reported by NPR: “ 'Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?' Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a campaign kickoff over the weekend,”
Item 1)., “Whitney Webb EXPOSES ….”, discusses in some detail the role of Alan Dershowitz as a customer of Epstein's operation, flying many times as a sex-passenger on Epstein's “Lolita Express” jet to "Paradise Island". Dershowitz absurdly claims that his wife accompanied him on all Lolita Express Flights. Dershowitz has written that girls' age of consent should begin immediately after their first menstrual cycle. Webb has written many articles about the use of sexual blackmail by a variety of forces prominent among them Israeli Intelligence operatives from Mossad. Webb has also written two important books about these issues One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, and One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 2: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein. In Item 2)., “Paul Craig Roberts: ….”, Roberts questions how Epstein rose from working as a Math Teacher at a Manhattan Prep School to fabulous wealth and power and concludes that the Israeli Mossad Agents and other operatives in the U.S. were involved in the veritable rags to riches Epstein Saga. In Item 3)., “Epstein, Donald Trump and ….”, Chris Hedges discusses the Epstein / Trump situation, and other sexual blackmail operations, with guest Nick Bryant; another fine journalist who has written a couple of books on sex and politics, one that looks at the sexual scandal in Omaha, Nebraska and the other that examines a gay escort service in Washington D.C. (See, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal and Confessions of a D.C. Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies, and Blackmail). In Item 4)., “MAGA Was Made a Promise ….”, David Cay Johnston discusses the Trump/Epstein situation for a few minutes. Johnston is always well informed about Trump whom he has interviewed numerous times and whose activities he has reported on for decades. As always Johnston is more cautious in his analysis than are the previous examinations of the material. In Item 5). “All the Epstein's men ….”, Max Blumethal and Aaron Mate are less reticent in their criticisms of Trump. In Item 6)., “Why Trump Can’t Shake ….”, Ezra Klein is more restrained in his criticism and analysis of Trump than are the more aggressive analyses in some of the previous items. In Item 7)., “In the conspiracy-addled ….”; and Item 8)., “Maga’s headed for ….”, the authors take on the strange convoluted world of Maga, and related factions and thinking.
The disarray among and true dismay of people, who are actually confronting the possibility that their hero and savior is a sexual pervert, the sort of person they guard their children against, is real. How much it will affect them or move them politically is questionable, but Americans are always sensitive to hypocrisy and phoniness. The Republicans are now moving to redistrict congressional seats to take advantage of a recent Supreme Court ruling against majority-minority districts hoping to take over as many as 5 House Seats in Texas alone. The sordid reality of Trump should never be far from view at least to those who do not live in the Far-right's media bubble.
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1). “Whitney Webb EXPOSES Epstein as Israel’s Agent”, Jul 19, 2025, Katie Halper interviews Whitney Webb, The Katie Halper Show, duration of video 11:14, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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2). “Paul Craig Roberts: Trump’s Biggest Mistake - The Epstein Saga”, Jul 14, 2025, Nima Alkhorshid interviews Paul Craig Roberts, Dialogue Works, duration of video 49:09, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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3). “Epstein, Donald Trump and Sexual Blackmail Networks (w/ Nick Bryant) | The Chris Hedges Report”, Jul 16, 2025, Chris Hedges interviews Nick Bryant, The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel, duration of video 1:02:28, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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4). “MAGA Was Made a Promise, Now They Are in Revolt, Prof. David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize Author”, Jul 15, 2025, Mark Thompson interviews David Cay Johnston, The Mark Thompson Show, duration of video 35:24, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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5). “All the Epstein's men - The Grayzone live”, Jul 17, 2025, Max Blumenthal & Aaron Mate discuss the spreading effects of the Epstein Files, The Grayzone, duration of video 2:26:17, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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6). “Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein | The Ezra Klein Show”, Jul 18, 2025, Ezra Klein interviews Will Sommer, The Ezra Klein Show, duration of video 1:10:14, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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In the conspiracy-addled mind of maga, Trump was supposed to defeat evil. By closing the Epstein case, he has become it
Maga is mad about more than a broken promise.
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Editor’s note: Two reminders. The Editorial Board is free to read and always will be. Please subscribe or leave a tip. Links at the end. And: I’m on Bluesky! Find me @editorialboard.bsky.social. Thanks! –JS
All right, I confess. When people began talking about how the Epstein scandal was going to break maga from the inside out, I was skeptical.
After all, we are talking about supporters who have been willing to believe pretty much anything that Donald Trump tells them to believe, including that Haitians “are eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” These self-same supporters have never blamed him, even when policies enacted by his regime have led to their personal ruination.
So when Trump told them to shut up about the attorney general closing the case on the disgraced financier and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, there’s nothing in our experience to suggest they wouldn’t. They have been so faithful, in fact, it would be more reasonable to question the sanity of liberals pining for “civil war” never to come.
And yet, despite all that, we are now into the second week of this scandal, more than six months into a presidency whose autocratic rule has otherwise rendered extinct the very concept of scandals. And thanks to Trump’s obsessiveness, there seems to be no end in sight.
“Let those weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats’ work,” he wrote of Republicans and maga media figures who have publicly broken from him. “Don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore.”
Beyond Trump himself, why is the Epstein scandal at the fore?
First, it isn’t because the maga faithful have suddenly realized that the president was bosom buddies with Epstein or that he was almost certainly a client. Some liberals and moderate pundits have suggested as much, but that’s a misreading of the maga mindset, especially the central role played in it by conspiracy theory, in particular QAnon.
Remember QAnon? That’s the “completely unfounded” belief that Donald Trump “is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media,” according to a helpful explainer published by the BBC after the J6 insurrection.
The BBC went on: “QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed.”
QAnon is a 21st-century update on the old “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was an antisemitic smear alleging a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. Jeffrey Epstein was Jewish. He became a symbol of the “elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles” who secretly run the world. About a fifth of the maga base is diamond-hard QAnon. After Trump won the election, they expected their savior to fulfill the prophecy.
So you can see that the consequences of closing the case of Epstein are far greater than a broken promise to a loyal base. All presidents break promises. Most of them are forgiven in time. How do you forgive a hero whom you believe was chosen by heavenly decree to be the world’s savior? You don’t. In failing to defeat evil, he has become it.
This almost theological facet of the story is why Lindsay Beyerstein believes there has been a “qualitative conceptual shift” that virtually everyone, including yours truly, has so far missed. “It has become conceivable to some of his most loyal supporters that he’s not just wrong but evil. That can’t be unthought, even if it can be repressed.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly broke with Trump on the Epstein issue. I never thought I’d see that happen. What’s going on?
Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and expose “the deep state.” Epstein isn’t a true-crime story for the base or even a metaphor for how billionaires screw us all. He is proof that QAnon is true.
Now that Trump is back in power, he’s under immense pressure to expose the pedo-cabal. Now he won’t deliver and the base is furious. Some are even starting to wonder if Trump’s in on the conspiracy.
When Trump says there’s nothing to see with the Epstein files, no rich co-conspirators, no nothing, he’s effectively saying that QAnon is fake.
The base can’t take that, so we’re seeing a bunch of House Republicans like Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Burchett, who are at least pretending to take the side of the base against Trump.
Johnson broke, but all the House Republicans voted Tuesday against a resolution on a vote to release the “Epstein files.” There may be cracks in the maga base, but they aren’t that big. How do you see it?
I think this is an irreconcilable conflict that’s only going to become more agonizing for the GOP. I don’t expect the Republican electeds to break with Trump over anything, but every time they vacillate, that’s another news cycle about how Republicans are hypocrites covering for pedophiles, which is exactly what Trump wants to avoid. It’s another reminder that the GOP is playing the conspiracist base for suckers.
Republicans (elected and media) are breaking trust with their own audiences. Charlie Kirk literally came out and said that he was going to stop talking about Epstein against his better judgment, because his friends in the White House told him to. This is less than 72 hours after everyone at his 7,000-person conference raised their hand to say they were upset at Trump over his handling of the Epstein issue.
Conspiracists’ ears perk up when they hear that someone has to shut up because powerful people ordered them to.
This is a perfect wedge issue.
They can’t appease Trump without further inflaming the base.
At the very least, it does seem like self-interest among maga media personalities will keep this going. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino signed off on the Epstein memo that closed the case, but appears to have chickened out on realizing how bad it was playing with his audience. He now has incentive to break with Trump, perhaps even lump him in with the evil space-laser Jews who run the universe.
Bongino came back to work on Monday, but I suspect his days at the bureau are numbered. He was saying how much he hated the job even before he ended up at loggerheads with the AG and lost this huge public fight. My hope is that he will quit and become the delusional avenging angel of the Epstein files, leading the charge against Bondi from the outside. That would be terrific. He’s a credible messenger to keep this story in the news and deepen the split within maga.
Before I get to the electoral effects, let me express skepticism. The Trump base has believed him before they believed their own lying eyes. They will suffer due to his decisions. It seems to me that they can be made to believe anything. Why is this so different?
That’s what I would have predicted, but the evidence of revolt is undeniable. You’ve got Sarah Longwell’s focus group that found that, among 2024 Trump voters who are upset about his handling of the Epstein case, they overwhelmingly suspect that Trump is in on the conspiracy. That’s an unthinkable reaction given how unwilling maga has been to entertain that Donald Trump is ever wrong, let alone evil.
You’ve got Trump getting ratioed on his very own platform for the first time when he trotted out the claim that the Epstein files were forged by [former CIA Director John] Brennan and Hillary Clinton. You’ve got thousands of attendees at Turning Point and every speaker on the program demanding transparency, which Trump desperately doesn’t want to provide. And there’s nobody he can fire to make this go away. If he gets rid of Bondi, the next AG will face the same problem.
This is the first time I’ve seen large numbers of magas willing to suspect the worst of Trump personally. It’s a sea change.
Even if he manages to tamp down this scandal in the short-term, there has been a qualitative conceptual shift. It has become conceivable to some of his most loyal supporters that he’s not just wrong but evil.
That can’t be unthought, even if it can be repressed.
Steve Bannon said the Republicans could lose 40 House seats on this issue. He said that as a warning if this does not go away. If so, that would mean even some GOP senators could be in serious trouble. That would make 2026 like 2010 in reverse. Is this really possible?
Bannon’s argument is compelling. About 20 percent of the Republican coalition is hardcore QAnon. If half those people get too disillusioned to vote, it’s going to be an electoral bloodbath for the GOP.
Trump’s superpower is mobilizing people who are disengaged from electoral politics. He got them to vote by promising to expose the deep state and the pedo-cabal. If they don’t feel like he’s delivering on those promises, they’re going to disengage again, with dire consequences.
They don’t have to become Democrats. They can just stay home. It’s hard to get this kind of voter out at the midterms at the best of times and this kind of disappointment will only further depress turnout.
Epstein is also serving as a permission structure to be mad at Donald Trump in a maga-coded way. Lashing out against the tariffs or the massive cuts to Medicaid makes you a RINO or “woke” in their eyes. But lashing out at Donald Trump in the name of Jeffrey Epstein’s child victims and the war on the deep state makes you a better, purer maga.
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Maga’s headed for schism
The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated, writes Lindsay Beyerstein.
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Editor’s note: The Editorial Board is free to read and always will be, but it’s also how I make a living. It’s how I support my family. If you can, please subscribe or leave a tip. Links at the bottom. Thanks! –JS
The good news is that Democrats have found the wedge issue that can shatter the maga coalition.
The bad news is that it’s Jeffrey Epstein.
The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell focus-grouped 2024 Trump voters who are disillusioned with Trump over the notorious FBI/Department of Justice memo that effectively closed the Epstein case.
The memo made it clear that they will not be releasing any more documents or pursuing cases against Epstein’s friends. It declared that there was no client list, no jailhouse murder, and no international blackmail ring.
This is all true, but to the QAnon base, it’s akin to the pope tweeting, “We’ve reviewed the files and Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Thank you for your attention in this matter.”
There’s no coming back from that.
Longwell asked the group whether they thought Trump cynically hyped the Epstein story or whether he was in on the conspiracy.
Overwhelmingly, they thought Trump was in on it.
This is a potentially explosive finding.
Normally, it’s impossible to get Trump supporters to believe that Trump has ever made the slightest misstep, but here we have former magas declaring that The Donald’s in league with ultimate evil.
Longwell understands how central Epstein is to the maga worldview. The base expects the Epstein files to fulfill prophecies broadcast on rightwing radio in the 1990s and elaborated through Pizzagate and QAnon. It was foretold that Bill and Hillary Clinton and all the Satanic Democrats would one day be exposed for their crimes against God and man.
To reasonable people, the Epstein saga is an outrage, but not a world historical event. To us, he was a degenerate billionaire who raped girls with his rich friends, dodged taxes and loved eugenics. To maga, however, Epstein was a leader of the Jewish Pedophile Cabal that runs the world.
For us, exposing Epstein’s confederates would undercut elite impunity and deliver justice to victims. For them, it would expose the Illuminati.
According to QAnon theology, Trump is on a divine mission to fight the pedophile cabal of the deep state. To many, Trump’s willingness to hunt down Epstein’s co-conspirators is a test. If he won’t do it, he’s not the Chosen One. As far as they’re concerned, Trump deserves to be our supreme leader because QAnon says so.
By implying that the globalist Epstein conspiracy isn’t real, Trump is undermining his own authority. Trump ran on exposing the Epstein files as part of his campaign against the deep state. Key members of his government like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino built their careers on it.
The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated. They were played for suckers and they know it. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” status anxiety is an accelerant for conspiratorial thinking. People gravitate towards conspiracy theories when they feel insecure. It’s a special affront, then, to be treated with contempt by the very people who were supposed to salve their egos.
Attorney General Pam Bondi humiliated some of maga’s favorite far-right influencers by meeting them at a much-hyped event at the White House and presenting them with binders full of what she implied would be blockbuster secrets. In fact, the binders contained information that had been public for years. Then she left them to explain to their angry fans why there were no secrets in those binders. Bondi stalled by claiming that the Epstein client list was on her desk.
Now even Daddy Trump is yelling at maga to stop talking about Epstein. Bongino and Patel allegedly co-wrote the infamous Nothing to See Here memo. It appears these career conspiracists were more than willing to brush the Epstein files under the rug until the backlash hit. The Epstein bait-and-switch is proof that not even the conspiracists’ most ardent and well-compensated champions in Washington care about them.
Some Democrats are hesitant to fan the flames of this scandal because they’re afraid of legitimizing conspiracy theories. That’s a valid concern. This saga has moved QAnon to the very center of our politics – even more than the antics of the QAnon Shaman at the J6 insurrection or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career.
However, there are also reality-based reasons to be up-in-arms about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein saga. There’s an opportunity for congressional Democrats to demand meaningful transparency on the Epstein case. The key is to stick to legitimate grievances, namely Trump’s broken promises, lies and conflicts of interest.
The DOJ-FBI memo claims that there are no more releasable documents. The FBI’s Epstein files are probably about 1 percent as interesting as people expect, but the government is lying about what they have. They say that there’s only child porn and material that would expose the identities of victims. However, we know from lawyers who worked on Epstein lawsuits for years that there’s plenty of material that could be safely redacted and released. There’s probably no client list per se, because Epstein wasn’t running a bordello and blackmail is the wrong model to understand what he was up to. The men who came to the island were friends, not customers. Epstein surely collected kompromat on them, but the FBI may not have gotten a hold of much of it. Epstein had years of advance warning that he might be charged and he had IT pros to help him hide it.
Initially, Bondi had agents working around the clock to gather materials from footlockers and hard drives in far-flung FBI field offices. This is material that presumably wasn’t available to the Biden-era DOJ. We were supposed to get huge revelations any day. Then suddenly they put out a memo saying there’s nothing to see. It’s fair to ask what changed.
There’s also a glaring conflict of interest. Depending on how you define the Epstein files, Trump is already all over them. Epstein’s black book, which has been public for years, contains 20 different ways to reach Trump and his household. He rode on Epstein’s plane. In fact, Trump and Epstein were best friends for over a decade. Their friendship was largely based on chasing girls.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told Landon Thomas, Jr. of New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
In the early 1990s, Trump flew in 28 models for a “beauty contest” where he and Epstein were the only guests. Trump appointed the US attorney who gave Epstein his notorious and illegal federal immunity deal to be his first-term secretary of labor. Epstein died on Trump’s watch. Let’s not forget that Trump is an adjudicated rapist in his own right. Elon Musk’s accusation that Trump is in the Epstein files may have finally given MAGA a permission structure to take this mountain of evidence seriously.
Astonishingly, Trump recently declared on Truth Social that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” which is tantamount to admitting that there are Epstein files with derogatory information about him. Whereupon, the president was ratioed on his own platform for the first time in Truth Social history.
I wouldn’t count on Trump to have a good handle on what’s in the files. He’s lazy and senile, after all. But something seems to have spooked him. Perhaps it’s just that the inexplicable force field that shielded Trump from the consequences of his well-known ties to Epstein is starting to crack and he wants to change the subject before it shatters entirely. Whatever it is, Longwell’s focus-groupers can sense it.
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