Crowd Control

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With arguably one exception, Republicans have never responded to Trump with the sort of bitterness that “normal” political leaders sometimes encounter when they disappoint their base. (See, e.g., progressive opinion about Joe Biden and Gaza.) MAGA is a church and Trump is its prophet; he who defines the faith cannot betray it.

The one exception has to do with the COVID vaccine, which the president’s first administration funded. He was booed at his own rallies for celebrating its success and got so spooked by his failure to shape populist opinion in his favor that he dropped the subject altogether. He’s since tried to atone to anti-vaxxers by putting a mega-kook in the MAGA coop and banning federal funding for schools that mandate the COVID shot.

I’ve never regarded the MAGA backlash to Operation Warp Speed as a true crisis for Trump, though, because it’s always been easy for right-wingers to exculpate him for it. He’s not a scientist, for one thing. What was he supposed to do when the diabolical Anthony Fauci promised him a miracle solution to the pandemic? And anti-vaxxism wasn’t a high populist priority in 2020 like it is in 2025. Trump didn’t reverse himself on something important by jumpstarting COVID immunizations the way he would have had if he had, say, canceled the border wall.

Epstein is different. Exposing the elite pedophile cabal that supposedly runs America has been a priority for his base for years. Trump promised to produce the client list if reelected. And there’s no expert class in this case that can be scapegoated for his failure. With Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino now running “the deep state,” producing the list is no more complicated than the president picking up the phone and giving the order.

For the first time, anyone with an ounce of influence on the right is being forced to choose between what Trump wants and what his base wants, two things that are normally synonymous. If you’re with him, your line on the Epstein files is to trust our leader when he says there’s nothing to see here. If you’re with MAGA, the panicky “nothing to see here” exhortations stink of a cover-up.

I don’t know if that’s a crisis for the White House, but it’s certainly a crisis for the sleazy complex of Republican politicians, administration officials, PACs, think tanks, media outlets, and “influencers” that cater to his fans. Apart from Trump, the populist right has come to expect ruthless audience capture from anyone who purports to speak for it. What happens when its demands conflict with a vindictive president’s?

Unspinnable.

In a crisis, it’s been said, people show you who they really are. There’s something to that in this case. MAGA cronies are reverting to raw self-interest in responding to the Epstein meltdown because the usual tricks to smooth over rifts between the president and his base aren’t working.

For one thing, there’s no obvious way this time to spin the matter to his and their mutual satisfaction.

There’s always a way to do that with policy. Slapping tariffs on the world and then pausing them, suspending mass deportation and then un-suspending it, promising no more “forever wars” and then bombing Iran—the average joe doesn’t follow such things closely enough to feel a strong sense of betrayal from those reversals. He’ll grant the president the benefit of the doubt when right-wing media inevitably asks him to. “Art of the deal” and all that.

In fact, and in the spirit of its leader, I don’t think Trump’s populist supporters have ever cared much about policy beyond turning the deterrence dial up to 11 on illegal immigration. What MAGA cares about is revenge on the dreaded elites, the root of all evil. Revenge was the explicit goal of Trump’s victorious campaign, remember, and the Epstein file provides an unusually stark opportunity to exact it.

There’s no way to explain his failure to seize that opportunity that will make his base happy. Unless and until Bondi produces a list of abusers that confirms the right’s priors in all respects—everyone whose politics I hate is a child molester—they’ll continue to demand the retribution they were promised and the sleaze complex will feel pressure to do the same.

The other problem in trying to smooth all of this over is that the clamor to name names has been handled so ineptly by the White House that it seems designed to further antagonize the right by goosing its paranoia.

There are now at least three different versions from the administration of what happened to Epstein’s client list. Bondi famously said a few months ago that it was sitting on her desk, before recently backtracking. Patel, who used to chirp to the suckers of MAGA media that the FBI had the list, suddenly declared this weekend in his role as agency director that “The conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been.” Trump himself scolded his supporters in Saturday’s Truth Social post for “giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” which suggests that there is a list but—you guessed it—it’s just another left-wing “hoax.”

Normally his fans would eat that up, but in this case, the scapegoating didn’t compute. Why would the Epstein files incriminate prominent liberals, as the right devoutly believes, if they were written by prominent liberals? Does Trump mean to imply that there is no “real” Epstein file, only an Obama-produced forgery that incriminates Republicans? Why didn’t Democrats release that forgery to smear the GOP? And without a real file, how does Trump plan to identify the hundreds of Democratic pedos? There are hundreds of Democratic pedos, aren’t there?

The essential warranty of the Trump presidency is that powerful elites have been lying to you for your whole life and he’ll expose their chicanery. Instead, on a matter of utmost populist salience, he and his team have told a story so rife with inconsistency that one or all of them simply must be lying. Which leaves true believers forced to choose between two unhappy options.

Either there really is no Epstein file and they’ve been lied to for years by their favorite “trusted” media sources, or the Trump administration is actively hiding the truth from them to protect … someone. Maybe they’re protecting U.S. or (if you’re Tucker Carlson) Israeli intelligence. Or maybe they’re protecting Trump himself, who told New York magazine in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. 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.”

There’s no spin here that will please the president and his base. The MAGA establishment has to choose.

Self-interest.

The most interesting contrast in that choice is between Patel and his top deputy at the FBI, Dan Bongino.

Patel has always been a Trump flunky. During the president’s first term he went from being a House aide to a member of the National Security Council to No. 2 in the office of the director of national intelligence to chief of staff for the secretary of defense, all in about three years. At one point Trump considered making him deputy director of the CIA. Now, absurdly, he’s the head of the FBI.

He was a mainstay on MAGA media from 2021 to 2025 but primarily as a guest, not as a host, someone whose perspective was valued because he was destined to hold a powerful office if Trump won reelection. He’s never been regarded as a superstar populist “infotainer.” So when the Epstein crisis forced Patel to choose between his patron and the right-wing media audience, he instinctively chose Trump. That’s how, after years of promoting Epstein dreck, he was able to say with a straight face this weekend that there “never have been” any such conspiracies.

Bongino is different. Not only is he a big name in righty infotainment, he grew so successful as a radio host over the last decade that he was chosen to fill Rush Limbaugh’s time slot on many local radio stations after the latter’s death in 2021. He made millions of dollars and had millions of listeners, whom he also regaled with Epstein conspiracies, of course, and he gave it all up when he agreed to become the FBI’s deputy director.

Then he ran into the Epstein buzzsaw. When he told Trump fans in May that Epstein’s death really was a suicide, some turned on him viciously. He went on Fox News and whined about how thankless his job was. Then, last week, he and Bondi had some sort of blow-up over the Epstein matter; word leaked that he had decided not to come to work on Friday in protest (No. 2 at the FBI isn’t an important job, apparently) and was thinking of resigning altogether.

Bongino, the charismatic MAGA media star, is siding with the base. To all appearances, he’s freaked out by having gotten crosswise with the people who made him rich and famous and is now trying to engineer his departure from the administration by pitting himself against Bondi, populists’ chief scapegoat in the Epstein fiasco. With any luck, he’ll be back on the radio before the year is out, teasing his chump listeners that he’s bound by law not to reveal “the truth” of what he saw in the Epstein file, but that he thinks Pam Bondi owes it to Americans to share it.

We’re going to see the Patel-Bongino dynamic replicated across the MAGA establishment, I suspect.

Most Republicans who hold office and/or have a light footprint in the infotainment world will calculate that the safer move is to back Trump and Bondi. That might annoy the base, but the base is too angry at the attorney general (and the president, to a lesser extent) to focus on congressional backbenchers who are taking cover behind the administration. Whereas if those same backbenchers sided with the base by putting pressure on Trump over Epstein, Trump would remember—and they know it.

Republicans who owe their fame and fortune to the populist vaudeville circuit, on the other hand, will continue to goose suspicions about the Epstein files even if it annoys Trump, because that’s what a media industry built on audience capture requires. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Fox & Friends, even the otherwise slavishly loyal Benny Johnson—they’ve all mouthed right-wing discontent in recent days over the White House’s secrecy about Epstein. You can’t posture as a tribune of The People if you’re making excuses for keeping The People in the dark. So they’re acting accordingly.

The only MAGA media figures I’m aware of who aren’t siding with their audiences, in fact, are those who’ve gained influence with Trump. Mark Levin had shown interest in the Epstein story in the past, for instance, but after successfully lobbying the president to attack Iran, he’s applauding Trump for dismissing the “Epsteinian kooks.”  Poor Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, has vowed to stop talking about Epstein altogether after he appeared to side with Bongino over Bondi at an event this past weekend and got a phone call from his friend Donald about it. Kirk has one foot in right-wing media stardom and the other in Trump Inc.; go figure that he’d try to peace out of this dispute altogether to avoid offending either of his gravy trains.

Most members of the MAGA establishment don’t have that luxury, though. They’ll feel obliged to take sides, however cautiously and conditionally, unless Trump figures out a way to make all of this go away.

Can he?

No way out?

One thing Trump could do is make Bondi a sacrificial lamb by firing her. That would be briefly politically useful, as it would signal to populists that he appreciates their anger at her for unforgivably failing to produce the, uh, Obama-written Epstein files.

But then what? Let’s say he replaces Bondi with Ken Paxton, God help us. What happens when Paxton can’t produce the Epstein client list either?

And what if Bondi refuses to be a fall guy? “I was willing to release the DOJ’s entire Epstein file but the president ordered me not to,” she might say to reporters, which may explain why he opened Saturday’s Truth Social post by stressing what a “FANTASTIC JOB!” she’s doing. She can inflict real political pain on him if she ends up discarded and disgruntled, so he’s keeping her inside the tent.

Another thing Trump could do is appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter, but that’s just a variation on the Paxton solution. The whole point of the last week is that there’s no one so trusted by populists that his or her “nothing to see here” verdict on Epstein will be accepted uncritically. If the president himself can’t get MAGA to drop the matter by ordering them to do so, no one can. Trump’s movement, as always, cares not about process, but about results. Any investigation that comes to a conclusion other than “the Democratic Party is a front for NAMBLA” will be derided and discredited.

Maybe what makes this go away is the same thing that makes all of Trump’s political problems eventually go away—namely, negative hyperpolarization.

Congressional Democrats have begun to needle the White House about the Epstein files, sensing a rare opportunity to wedge some of his diehard supporters away from him. But if the past is prologue, that’s the sort of tribal Pavlovian prompt that will convince some disaffected populists to start defending him again. If Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries want the files released, then it must be that they are Democratic forgeries, perhaps ones that incriminate Trump himself. How could any true MAGA patriot align themselves with a left-wing pressure campaign to smear the president?

Before you know it, marquee populists like Kirk will be doing monologues on the supposedly crucial difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, just in case such things should suddenly become politically useful.

Meanwhile, we’re sure to see some new conspiracy theory floated from Trump’s most fanatic supporters that purports to neatly explain his reluctance to publish what the DOJ has. An easy one: Maybe he’s keeping the client list a secret because he’s blackmailing the people on it into somehow serving the glorious America First agenda. If the list were to come out, all of his leverage would be gone. Not only is it a good thing that he won’t publish the list, it’s downright patriotic.

Beginning with the Access Hollywood scandal in 2016 and on up through January 6 and his numerous criminal indictments, Trump’s strategy with any crisis that threatens to alienate parts of his base is to plow ahead and trust that his supporters will ultimately side with him over the critics whom they’ve spent their lives hating. That’ll probably be the play in this case too. Tribalism is gravity, and gravity always wins.