MAGA expert Will Sommer has a great piece today on the Epstein freak-out. He looks at the cult’s various reactions and determined that it just isn’t going away any time soon. The more Trump calls them stupid and orders them to cease and desist, the more upset they get.
He speculates as to why this is happening:
SO WHY IS IT THAT EPSTEIN—and not the attack on Iran or Medicaid cuts—has caused such a severe rupture within MAGA? I think it’s because Trump, through the right-wing media, has been engaged in a decade-long game of playing pretend with his base. In the first term, they pretended Mexico would build the wall, and that Trump could bring all the manufacturing jobs back. Now they’re pretending that mass deportations will make everything from food to housing affordable, and even eliminate traffic jams.
Then, with the Epstein memo, Trump abruptly stopped pretending. Instead, he offered a reaction akin to Whoa, you people are a bunch of dumb freaks, I don’t want to play this game anymore! And his fans—and, by extension, the people in right-wing media who built their careers playing this game—are mad about it.
What should scare Trump is that this could all get much worse. And weirder. Jessica Reed Kraus, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. devotee with more than 1.3 million followers on Instagram, has launched a campaign amid the chaos to win Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon. But despite her efforts, Kraus couldn’t stomach Trump’s thrashing about.
“He’s only making this disaster worse by the day,” Kraus groaned on an Instagram story.
He is not the same man he was in the first term, obviously. His age is catching up with him and he’s obviously much more brittle and impatient — and he’s bought into his own hype. I think he now literally believes he has been ordained by God and it’s intensely frustrating to him that some of his loyal followers are rejecting that premise.
It’s a bigger deal than he realizes. Cults can fall apart.