IN RECENT weeks the MAGA world has, according to both gleeful mainstream media commentary and hysterical alternative media denunciations, imploded. The narrative is that the non-release of the Epstein Files, combined with the leak of a Department of Justice memo concluding that Epstein killed himself and that there is no evidence of a remaining ‘list’ of clients or that Epstein was blackmailing the famous and powerful with evidence of their sex crimes, has caused a major split in Trump’s support.
It’s a controversy that has been building for some time. When Pam Bondi conducted the February ‘MAGA influencer’ summit in which a whole host of alternative media influencers received files marked Epstein Files 1.0, there was real expectation that the review being conducted under this administration would detect and release new information about the Epstein case. Those convinced that Epstein was murdered were expecting confirmation of that. Similarly, many MAGA influencers believed that the administration had promised them a list from which criminal cases against other rich and powerful perverts could follow. They point to Bondi’s statement that the Files were ‘sitting on my desk’ ready to be looked at, along with similar batches of information on the JFK assassination, and see the lack of fresh, firm evidence of crime as a betrayal and a cover-up.
But that understanding, which has driven the MAGA influencers and some sections of the Republican base who follow them into a frenzy of speculation and fury, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The Trump administration and the MAGA influencers started from different positions and interpreted what ‘the Epstein Files’ were differently from the very start. If you look at Bondi’s actual statement on this, she doesn’t promise that they will find evidence of other perverts and bring them to justice. What she promised, what the administration promised, is the review itself. They would go through the ‘Epstein Files’ (meaning all the official information on Epstein they could find) and review it. The promise was to look for the crimes, not to confirm them regardless of what the evidence said. When Bondi said the Files were on her desk, she clearly meant all the official information held by the FBI and other agencies that she, FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Don Bongino could go through.
There was never a promise to confirm that Epstein was murdered, or to find new and damning evidence of a Client List. Influencers heard what they wanted to hear, and expected confirmation of their existing assumptions. When this confirmation didn’t arrive, they felt cheated. This was made worse by the staged event of the Files influencer summit. What Bondi supplied in that folder was a collection of all the information already known. This perhaps explains why it was marked ‘Epstein Files 1.0’. The influencers make their money on new and extreme information, the more shocking the better. Proudly waving a folder of ‘everything we already know’ made them look foolish, and angered them as well. But their idea that this was a deliberate deception is equally ridiculous as the idea that Epstein operated entirely alone and that none of the rich and powerful who attended his parties ever ‘sampled the goods’ on offer.
For a government lawyer like Bondi, even one in a radically transparent administration, sharing the Files meant exactly what she did – it meant saying ‘here’s the information we have, here is your copy’. For a lawyer, that is equivalent to ‘full disclosure’ to an opposing brief, and unusually open and honest in terms of politics. For influencers denied the startling new revelations they were expecting, it’s another cover-up. These influencers of course completely ignore that these Files, if they ever included a Client List and blackmail material damning other powerful people, have been in the hands of the thoroughly corrupt Biden administration. Influencers furious at the review conclusions and certain that Bondi, Patel and Bongino (as well as Trump) are all covering up the real dirt and denying real justice, seem oblivious to the fact that what this administration received and could access had already been held by the Biden-era FBI for four years – an ample timeframe in which to secrete elsewhere or destroy the information they wanted to suppress.
What the Trump administration has to give, then, is likely an already censored, already redacted, carefully controlled remainder of the kind of Epstein Files the influencers want revealed. Without a fresh investigation which is much more than a review of existing evidence, interviewing every alleged victim and comparing those commentaries, the chances of a secret trove of incriminatory evidence being perfectly preserved were slight, and its absence logically explicable without any need for assuming that everyone in this administration is just as corrupt as the previous one. There’s a slim possibility that they found something horrific and are lying about it, perhaps due to proof of foreign government involvement that embarrasses current foreign relations, but without new evidence that too can only be a speculative worry and not a confirmed betrayal.
The furious influencers of course are not acting on logic when assessing these things, but on a toxic combination of grandstanding moral purity, outraged disappointment, and inherent bias towards extreme and sensationalist responses because these are the things on which their careers have been built. All the ire they turned on the FBI and CIA in the Biden years (often completely justified) now transfers in a far less justified fashion to the current administration. An inherited Epstein mess, where the vast majority of the crimes being speculated about must have occurred when Trump’s enemies were in power, gets dumped on this administration for the lack of fresh discoveries and the absence of criminal prosecutions.
Now we get to the second stage of the affair. The globalist progressive media outlet Axios broke the news of the internal Department of Justice memo. Bongino and Patel then had to give embarrassing interviews where they appeared both annoyed and evasive, but in which they confirmed that ‘Epstein killed himself’ and that there was no detected Client List or evidence of a blackmail ring. It’s at that point that the base as well as the influencer segment became enraged. Yet nobody in that base or amongst the influencers seems to have noted the curious fact that this latest round of fury and offence was initiated by a media outlet with a track record of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the kind of outlet that would be leaked to if the sole purpose was harm to this administration.
That in turn was followed by a curious phenomenon, a two-pronged outright assault on the Trump government. So-called MAGA influencers such as Megyn Kelly, Laura Loomer and Tucker Carlson went after Attorney General Pam Bondi, all selling the line that she had covered up the Epstein Files. At the same time mainstream media like CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, all the usual suspects, ran an internal Trump administration warfare angle. Both the disgruntled influencers and the mainstream media said that Bongino and Patel were furious with Bondi, that Bongino was about to resign in disgust, and that Patel would likely follow. Both these lines of attack assumed that a malignant cover-up had been proven and that the Trump administration was now protecting powerful perverts . . . all without any actual evidence of that. The failure to share evidence assumed to exist was apparently enough to damn the administration, transferring all prior crimes and all Epstein guilt from the Clinton to Biden years to Trump and his current government.
Astonishingly, MAGA influencers who pride themselves as opponents of the mainstream media seem oblivious to the way in which their wounded egos and demand for absolute purity and perfection so far as their assumptions see those things, are now working for and even following the lead of outlets such as Axios, the Atlantic and CNN. A co-ordinated assault on the integrity, trustworthiness and decency of the Trump administration, together with a narrative of disunited internal warfare, directly serves the interests of the Deep State and of long-standing opponents of Donald Trump, who must be grinning like Cheshire cats in response to MAGA influencers at war with Trump over the Epstein Client List.
Notably Patel has released the following tweet:
It’s also been revealed that Bongino and Patel were in the email exchange deciding the contents of the leaked memo, and Bondi was not. Whatever personal frictions exist in the Trump administration, they don’t centre on disagreement regarding what the Epstein Files show us. The whole administration seem honestly to feel that they have looked and found nothing they can pursue further. It was actually Bongino and Patel (the two with the strongest prior reputation as opponents of Deep State corruption) who concluded that Epstein killed himself and that blackmail information was missing from all the files they inherited. If there is Bongino-Bondi friction, it likely seems based not on different views on Epstein, but on each blaming the other for the fallout of how information was shared and the way that has played directly into the hands of those who hate this administration.
What we may have witnessed here then is a kind of conspiracy, but not the one being talked about. We may have seen a successful mainstream media operation or sting to turn easily manipulated and gullible influencers, who think they are much smarter than they are, against the Trump administration, carefully seeded by leaks to Globalist media outlets exploiting a fundamental difference in understanding regarding what the release of Epstein Files means. This has transferred Epstein guilt from those who would have been actively involved and suppressing it at the time, to an administration which has reviewed whatever remains it inherited and told us they found nothing. Such an operation would actually mirror the way leaks were unsuccessfully used to try to remove Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In this case the sting has worked, causing the first polling drop in support for Trump since the election victory.
Trump of course is furious, and issued a long tweet which correctly points out how much good the administration and Bondi are doing. The entire Epstein scandal has been successfully shifted from the crimes themselves and who was in charge when they happened, to Trump’s administration, all in ways that benefit the truly guilty and the Deep State. Trump wants focus to return to successful Supreme Court victories against lawfare, successful deportations, the incredibly strong and restored border, and the ways in which Bondi, Patel and Bongino have been heading current arrests of child sex traffickers and child abusers active today.
It’s a fair point, but whether it will get a fair hearing is another matter.
