MAGA crack-up over Epstein shows how flimsy Republican coalition is

Democrats should rejoice! Not in schadenfreude over Trump’s travails with the Epstein story, but a real celebration about our own disparate but, yes, inclusive coalition that comprises the Democratic Party.

Let’s have a look at what’s going on in MAGA world. There have been about 10 headlines over the last 24 hours about the crack-up within Trump’s MAGA movement over Epstein. CNN alone featured two today: “Epstein fallout poses a loyalty test: Trump — or MAGA?” and “MAGA media’s conspiracy theories put Trump in power — and now they’re coming back to bite him.” David French in the Times op-ed page put it this way: “MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein.” Dan Rather weighed in with “MAGA Turns on Trump” on Substack, writing about the “revolt of voters who elected him.”

The Epstein conspiracy theory that the QAnon-adjacent fringe of the Republican Party has been pushing for years has come back to bite them in the ass. It’s a delicious irony that Trump’s problem with the Epstein story is the same one he’s facing in court as his Department of Justice has tried to defend what he’s doing with his scheme of mass deportation of immigrants. Trump’s lawyers have faced questions from judges to which they don’t have answers, because what they’re working with are Stephen Miller’s lies. All the migrants on the planes were Venezuelan gang members and MS-13, the DOJ lawyers said. Well, it turns out some of them were, but a lot of them weren’t. You can’t go into court with sound-bites on Fox News and use them as evidence.

The problem Trump faces with his MAGA base is that he and his minions infected them for years with lies about Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Democratic Party officials and power brokers. People like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino went on Fox and right-wing podcasts and flapped their lips about secret leftist cabals that were using the basements of pizza joints to traffic children for sex – even to kill them and drink their blood in some of the most extreme paranoid lies from the Right. Trump promised that as soon as he got in office, he would release all the files on Epstein and the big leftist conspiracy.

Then he got elected and told his Attorney General to have a look at the Epstein files and do what he’s been promising: release them! Let everybody know all about the Democrat sex cabals and flights on Epstein’s jets!

We don’t know what Pam Bondi found when she looked into the Epstein files, or if in fact she even looked at them, but we do know what the result was. She said, on behalf of President Trump, that there was no there there.

Now his coalition of rabid freaks looking for major Democrats to be brought down are not just dissatisfied, they’re pissed. Why? It’s dawning on at least some of them that they were lied to by Dear Leader, when they’ve been trained to believe that only Democrats lie.

That’s the problem with basing a political movement on conspiracy-mongering and lies. When Trump got in the position where he could prove all the crap he’s been feeding them was true, he couldn’t. The reason could have been, as Elon Musk said, that his own name was in the files. But that doesn’t really matter at this point. What matters is that a big part of the glue that’s been holding his MAGA coalition together has dried up and cracked.

It's fun to watch the whole MAGA house of cards come crashing down, but that’s not why Democrats should be happy. We should rejoice in the simple fact that our coalition wasn’t built on lies. It’s based on empathy and equality and fairness. You don’t have to gin up a bunch of conspiracy theories if what you stand for is feeding school breakfasts and lunches to children who are hungry. It doesn’t take lies to support poor people having access to adequate health care. We don’t have to spin conspiracy theories and promise to jail our opponents and round-up migrants trying to escape persecution and poverty and do away with the history of slavery and women’s rights to get people to vote for Democrats.

We’ve got a candidate for Mayor who just won his primary by telling people he wants to make living in New York City more affordable, that he wants to lower rents and provide access to cheaper food. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s talking about food and a roof over your head and health care as a human right.

The MAGA movement is kept alive with a steady diet of lies and grievance and conspiracies that feed their need to believe that God is on their side and everyone who doesn’t believe as they do is evil. In fact, Trump has taken to using that word, evil, more and more often. The problem with keeping the good-vs-evil thing going is this: people are aware that the person in line ahead of them at Target or Walmart, the family who lives down the street, the person who serves them in a restaurant or fixes the brakes on their car or takes a deposit at the bank is not an agent of the Devil, even if some of them are Democrats.

Crying “Wolf!” doesn’t get you anywhere unless people see actual wolves marauding in their neighborhoods. What they’re seeing instead are masked men wearing camo costumes and brandishing guns and arresting people without warrants, and polls are beginning to show that they don’t like it.

The Epstein files were a distraction, and now even the MAGA movement is catching on. People are tired of being depressed by bad news and anger and hate. Democrats don’t offer distractions. They offer solutions to people’s problems and hope.