When Is MAGA Going to Get Sick of Being Lied To?
Stop listening to people who are telling you not to trust your own eyes.
For the last two or three weeks, I’ve been working on a story about Pizzagate, QAnon, Jeffrey Epstein, and the role conspiracy theories play on the new right. It’s sprinkled with some anecdotes about my experiences with various media personalities and politicians, before I hopped off the Trump Train for good. It’s a very long piece, and I’ve been struggling with it because I’m trying to summarize a decade of schizophrenic politics and paranoia, and the new right’s role in it all. I’ll give you an idea of where I’m going in this piece. It seems like a good time, considering what’s in the news right now.
As I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump and his team are terrified of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. It has been confirmed that Attorney General Pam Bondi notified him that he appears in the Epstein files.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice scoured the Epstein documents to “flag” any references to Trump. That’s important because ABC News asked Trump on July 15 if Bondi had notified him that his name appeared in the files. “No, no, she’s—she’s given us just a very quick briefing,” he said. That was a lie.
Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, who is also Trump’s personal lawyer, informed him that his name, in fact, appeared multiple times in the Epstein files, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s why Trump chose not to release them, and why he has been attempting to divert the public’s attention away from the story by any means necessary, from painting Epstein as a pitiable victim of the Democratic Party to considering a pardon for his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Yes, that’s right. Maxwell, who has been credibly accused by at least 40 women of being party to Epstein’s depredations, now stands a good chance of being rehabilitated by Trump as a courageous paragon of truth and transparency.
To pull off something so outrageous, something so shocking to the conscience, Trump needs his allies with microphones, people like Charlie Kirk.
Yesterday, I noted that Kirk had already begun the work of preparing his MAGA audience to accept clemency for Maxwell in exchange for a deal with the Trump administration:
Now Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer has confirmed they are in discussions with the federal government about holding discussions. Maxwell is currently sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking, but is pursuing a claim that her trial was unfair. Since she is still contesting her own case, that may impact what she is ready to tell prosecutors. But maybe some kind of a deal could be reached for information. We will see.
Maxwell met with Deputy Attorney General Blanche yesterday, giving the impression that Trump has deployed his personal lawyer to handle this matter. When Maxwell left the meeting, she was spotted carrying a mysterious white box. Afterward, Trump told reporters that he was “allowed” to pardon her if he felt so inclined.
The game is obvious. If Maxwell plucks some red meat out of that box Trump gave her—nothing that is damning for him, of course—then she gets leniency. Trump would be able to throw those carefully curated cuts to his supporters, hoping that it would be enough to throw them off the trail, a practice known as a “limited hangout” in espionage. It is possible that there won’t be a deal, considering that most people with eyes to see at this point understand exactly what Trump hopes to do with Maxwell. It’s almost comical.
Still, Trump needs his dogs to pull the sled in whichever way he points at a given moment. Right now, that means full speed ahead with portraying Maxwell as a victim and possibly a martyr. If there ends up being no deal in the end, everyone who has been preparing MAGA fans to accept it will simply flood the zone with some other nonsense and pivot. It’s a classic Trump tactic, and it usually works, except maybe now it won’t. Epstein’s shadow is too big to so easily step out of.
Most people, least of all MAGA people, cannot fathom the degree to which Trumpworld is a vortex of sin. There are no friends. There are no convictions. No one believes in anything except their own power and profit and station. It is a black hole of morality that crushes all that is good. “That’s just politics,” some might say. It’s not. It’s something darker, far more sinister. People who are not necessarily bad are forced to go back on the things they believe in through an endless series of loyalty tests. Someone hands you a knife, and if you flinch, they know you’re not really on the team. There’s something about you that hasn’t been corrupted, some principle that hasn’t been sacrificed on the altar of Trumpism yet. It’s true of Kirk, of Tucker Carlson, of JD Vance, and all the rest.
That is how you get pundits and politicians who claim to be good and decent Christians who either go along with or turn a blind eye toward how Trump is handling the Epstein issue.
So what is your solution, Pedro? Impeachment? Biden and his gang had the Epstein files for four years. If Trump is somehow implicated in Epstein's crimes, why did Biden not release that information?
I think you are being unfair in lumping Tucker Carlson and J. D. Vance in as simply shills for Trump. They are doing their best to steer him away from the neocons and Wall St. Elites. It is a particularly difficult position for Vance to be in at this time. But, Tucker has been outspoken on the war issue and on Epstein files.