07/18/2025
“Donald Trump’s MAGA base, over which he has had a decade-long cultlike hold, is in open revolt against him,” Peter Wehner argues. “And his initial efforts to quell the uprising have, so far, only further inflamed it.” https://theatln.tc/ZJXor6HN
MAGA figures in the Trump administration once promised to release what they claimed was incriminating evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s death and powerful figures in his world of s*x trafficking and pe******ia. But last week, the Justice Department said that there was no incriminating client list kept by Epstein or anyone else, and that there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
Those MAGA figures “are now said to be complicit in a ‘deep state’ cover-up. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that even Trump himself might be involved,” Wehner writes. “Trump is demanding that his base move on. For the first time, many of them are saying no.”
Natalie Winters, a correspondent for Steven Bannon’s podcast “War Room,” has said that the Epstein case goes to the “very foundation of MAGA” because “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.” Bannon recently called the Epstein case “a key that picks the lock on so many things—not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who was working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government.
“Once the Epstein case became the personification of the deep state’s nefariousness, it took on incredible, even hallowed meaning for MAGA supporters,” Wehner explains. “It activated them in ways that only conspiracy theories—and angry, embittered fights over conspiracy theories—can do. For Trump to get on the wrong side of a MAGA conspiracy is highly unusual, and it explains why, for the first time, his base is upset with him. Trump is on the wrong side of what is, for them, sacred … The rest of us should take note, because this is a preview of coming attractions.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Sources: Nic Antaya / Getty; Shutterstock.
