I had not realized that Jeffrey Epstein had become so central to the MAGA fantasy universe. Apparently this really is blowing up MAGA. Trump is even being slammed by his followers on Truth Social. This is turning into a big deal.
The best thing I’ve read so far is by David French, MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein. This looks beyond just the current roiling of MAGA to the probable eventual breakup of MAGA and what this will do to the Republican party. Just read it. And let me know what you think.
[Update: Steve M is skeptical that MAGA is going to break up. It may not just yet. But there’s been one nativist right-wing movement after another in the U.S. for about as long as there has been a U.S. In the antebellum period there were Know-Nothings, and after the Civil War came the Ku Klux Klan. And then in the early 20th century the Klan flared up again. After World War II came McCarthyism and the pseudo-conservatives that Richard Hofstadter wrote about in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently there was the Tea Party. These movements are not identical and didn’t focus on exactly the same issues, but in many ways it’s all one pathology, complete with nutty conspiracy theories. MAGA is just the newest version. If the past is our guide, MAGA will collapse eventually, and then after some period of time it will reform as something else around some other personality or issue.]
And see also Dave Weigel, Why MAGA can’t move on from the ‘Epstein files’. (Note that Weigel has left WaPo and is now writing for Semafor. WaPo has lost nearly all of its best editorial writers, IMO. Way to go, Jeff Bezos.)
As far as I can tell, the MAGA faithful are still refusing to consider that the coverup is about protecting Trump. Mehdi Hasan put together a video documenting how close Trump and Epstein were for many years. They had a falling out a few years ago, but not over Epstein’s well-documented vices.
And see also MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything by Will Bunch.
I wasn’t initially planning to write about Epstein because in a moment of unAmerican raids on immigrants by masked secret police and GOP boasting about its new concentration camps, a sex scandal — even one that touches Trump — didn’t feel so important. But watching the MAGA implosion in recent days has made me realize I was wrong — as are the parade of Democratic elected officials who go on MSNBC to declare that any story not about Medicaid cuts is “just a distraction.”
In other news: The Miami Herald is reporting that Hundreds at Alligator Alcatraz have no criminal charges, Miami Herald learns. No surprise, but habeas corpus has not lawfully been suspended. This means those hundreds of incarcerations are unlawful.
In more other news: See Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response in the New York Times. As I wrote in the last post, Trump seems to think natural disasters just don’t ever happen, and if they do happen it’s something no one could have seen coming. This act is going to get real old if people stop getting timely warnings about hurricanes and the other major storms that do happen every year. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp he’s setting up his own administration to fail at something that can kill him politically.