And why he’ll get away with it.
Since last Monday, when the Justice Department announced it would not be releasing documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein and his 2019 death in a New York prison, the MAGA movement has been up in arms.
Prominent voices like Megyn Kelly are calling on President Donald Trump to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino reportedly skipped work on Friday after a vicious fight with Bondi over the non-release. And a Truth Social post from Trump calling on his allies to stop talking about Epstein has not yet put out the fires.
“No issue has exposed the underlying fault lines in the MAGA tent quite like the so-called Epstein files,” wrote Ian Ward, Politico’s reporter covering the right.
So why the rage?On the Right
The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp.
Part of it is anger at hypocrisy. The MAGA base is deeply invested in the idea that Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring — that he did not merely abuse young girls on his own, but rather pimped them out to other rich and powerful people. Pretty much everyone in the administration, from Trump down, promised to get to the bottom of this story — and now, they’re doing nothing.
“The conspiracy theorists go into the government, and they come back out and they say, ‘Nothing to see here.’ There could not be a bigger betrayal, and that is why the heads are exploding all over the right right now,” Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies right-wing media, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.
But there’s something even deeper at work here. In telling his supporters to move on from Epstein, Trump is betraying a fundamental structure of his political movement: its populism. He is showing, in short, that MAGA is not truly a movement of the people against the elites, but rather, a politics that revolves around Trump himself.
The personal nature of Trump’s political appeal is why he has managed to weather so many previous political storms, from the Access Hollywood tape to his several criminal indictments. While there’s a lot of heat right now surrounding Epstein, I expect the outcome to be similar.
But the current controversy is important nonetheless. It is powerful evidence that the notion of Trump as an authentic populist, rather than an opportunistic one, should be buried in Jeffrey Epstein’s grave.Jeffrey Epstein as MAGA’s defining populist issue
Populism is one of those terms that people throw around very loosely. The most precise definition, to my mind, comes from a prescient 2004 article by the political scientist Cas Mudde called “The Populist Zeitgeist.”
Mudde saw, long before Trump, that the future of Western politics would be shaped by populist politics. By “populism,” he did not just mean generic anti-establishment politics, but something more specific: “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”
The key word here is “ideology.” Populism is not merely a rhetorical style pitting elites against the people, but a genuine belief that this is the true axis of political conflict. In the populist worldview, the people have a unified set of common-sense beliefs (“the general will”) that would fix politics if implemented. The only reason it is not happening, for the populist, is that malign elites are preventing the people and their champions from holding power.
