At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer reminds us that “A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles.” And during the campaign he seemed to promise to release the files. But when the files were demanded they suddenly became hard to find, and then Trump decided the whole Epstein controversy was a hoax. (The President Who Cried ‘Hoax’)

Well, today we get a two-for-one.

President Trump on Friday doubled down on his assertion that all this controversy about Jeffrey Epstein is a “hoax” cooked up by Democrats to distract from their “disastrous” policies and the government shutdown. And he also threatened to order up his own investigations into Epstein’s ties with prominent Democrats.

Ongoing investigations might give him an excuse to not release the files.

Anyway, Trump’s most loyal influencers and media bobbleheads (see, for example, Megyn Kelly) have been trying hard to downplay the Epstein episode on Trump’s behalf. But at least a portion of Trump’s culties aren’t letting it go.  See Philip Bump at MSNBC, The Epstein files sinkhole widening under Trump. Once Trump was in the White House again and in a position to release the files, he didn’t. “Polling has repeatedly shown that this incongruity has created a schism in his support,” Bump writes.

Now that the House discharge petition has been signed, Speaker Johnson has promised a vote on releasing the files next week. If this bill passes it goes to the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to end cloture and get voted on, thanks to the filibuster rule. But there is a lot of speculation that there are enough Republicans in both the Senate and House who will break with Trump to pass the thing. Chris Hayes discussed this last night.

As one guy on MSNBC admitted, the record of who voted for what is going to last a lot longer than the Trump Administration. Those who don’t vote to release the files risk spending what’s left of their political careers being challenged to explain why they tried to protect pedophiles. So there’s another schism among Republicans in the making.

And of course, there’s always the possibility that the Trump Administration will refuse to comply.

But Epstein is not the only source of disaffection on the Right. See America First? Some Trump Supporters Worry That’s No Longer the Case. by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tyler Pager at The New York Times.

President Trump has been dining with Wall Street bigwigs. He has embarked on an opulent revamp of the White House at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their bills. He has expressed support for granting visas to skilled foreigners to take jobs in the United States. He approved a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, helping a foreign government and wealthy investors at a moment when the U.S. government was shut down.

For a president who returned to office promising to avoid foreign entanglements, make life more affordable and ensure that available jobs go to American citizens, it has been a significant departure from the expectations of his loyal base. And it is starting to open a rift with his supporters who were counting on a more aggressively populist agenda.

I understand that through his whole life Trump has always wanted to be accepted into New York’s social elite, the people with old money who give summer parties in their mansions in the Hamptons. I’ve only read about them, but I understand that’s what they do. Anyway, Trump was always some nobody from Queens to them. They don’t accept him because he’s crude and loud and doesn’t know how to dress or behave or use the right fork. But now he thinks he can do one better; be accepted among the global elite who supposedly control everything. You know, the people he promised to expose and destroy. Oops! But he’s not about to destroy them (assuming he could) if he’s got a shot at being one of them.

And he hasn’t been helping himself by declaring that his economy is great and that the prices of groceries and gas and everything have gone down, when they haven’t.

See also Trump Is Losing His Grip on MAGA by Hugh Cameron at Newsweek.

Reeling over the farmer furor that has met his plan to import Argentine beef, and now from Democratic victories in last week’s off-cycle elections, Trump is facing friendly fire over perceived pivots on immigration, the state of the economy and the latest episode of the long-running Epstein saga that has dogged his second administration’s every step.

Many of these tensions came to a head in an interview with Laura Ingraham that aired on Monday, during which the Fox News host challenged the president on offering 600,000 visas to Chinese students and his unexpected praise for the H-1B visa program, characterizing these as decidedly anti-MAGA stances.

Observers quoted in this article admit that Trump will never lose his core support. But the MAGA core support is only a small part of the Republican base. And a lot of people who supported Trump last year are not die-hard MAGA. And they are questioning what MAGA even means and what the Trumpified Republican party even is.

Can Trump distract his way out of the hole he’s in? He can try, but I don’t think so. He’s become increasingly dysfunctional. See Quit “sane-washing” Donald Trump by Brian Karem at Salon. A sample:

Try to make sense of this gibberish from a recent appearance at the American Business Forum on Nov. 7. “For generations,” he said, “Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa.” Later he corrected himself to say South America, which isn’t a country but a continent. South Africa has never been a communist country — but there was apartheid and Elon Musk.

Then Trump insulted New York, but said the city was good when he came to Washington — and then someone got their hair done “very expensively” and is now teaching at Harvard. 

There was also this tangent during his speech to military leaders at Quantico on Sept. 30: “. . . That you couldn’t get people to join the armed forces, and by the way, the police also, fire department, and I always put the fire department because they’re great. They’re great. And I got 95% of their vote…and they’re great in our inner cities. It’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war. And the fire department goes up in ladders and, you know, people shooting at them…they’re up on these ladders. It goes way up to the sky.”

At some point the Supreme Court could find his tariffs unconstitutional, which would actually be good for the economy but will throw Trump into a tailspin. And at some point, more Epstein files could be released, and then we’ll learn what he’s been so desperate to keep hidden. Trump wants to start a war with Venezuela, and I don’t think Americans will rally around him if he does.  But even without those things, I don’t see him reversing the slow downward spiral he’s in now.