The Trump administration has been talking a big game on Jeffrey Epstein for quite some time. Now the bill is coming due, and they are refusing to pay it. Right after Trump assumed office and promised to change everything, right-wing personality Benny Johnson asked FBI Director Kash Patel that “you say that the FBI has Epstein’s list, they’re sitting on it…Why is the FBI protecting the largest-scale pederast in human history?” Patel responded “Simple, because of who’s on that list.” It’s so simple! We just need our guy in the photo above in charge of the list, and then it’ll get released! Now for MAGA to take a big sip of coffee and check this week’s news.
Over the weekend, the Department of Justice released a memo announcing that they and the FBI concluded that Epstein had no “client list” and he died by suicide. Trump’s DOJ also released a video from inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein died to try to demonstrate that no one entered his cell that night, and at least according to the timestamp in the bottom left corner of the footage, there is a missing minute and two seconds from this 11 hour video, as Gizmodo clipped here.
This has, frankly, driven a significant sect of MAGA to the brink of insanity, or even sanity, perhaps. I braved the Twitter swamps to see how they were reacting to this, only to find prominent posters and podcasters on the right-wing demonstrating logic for the first time in years, possibly decades for some. “We need an investigation into Pam Blondi [sic]” wrote frequent White House visitor and white nationalist Laura Loomer. “No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump. This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!” screeched powerful right-wing influencer Mike Cernovich. “We were promised the Epstein client list and flight logs—now we’re being told they don’t even exist. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to be a bulwark against exactly this kind of deep state obfuscation?” said actor and alleged sex criminal turned right-wing grifter Russell Brand. Alex Jones of Infowars fame even cried and claimed he was going to throw up. A right-wing personality who realized he was used for a Trump photo-op, Jack Posobiec, talked about his previous visit to the White House with Piers Morgan where “nobody told us that the Epstein files would be anywhere even on the agenda for that day and it was really sprung as a surprise to all of us…before we even have a chance to look into [these binders] we’re hauled actually in front of the cameras because Prime Minister Kier Starmer was visiting the White House…by the time we had the ability to go through them, lo and behold we find out that it’s all information that was completely already in the public domain…the whole thing is as you say, a cock-up.”
MAGA is mad mad.
And why shouldn’t they be? This has been their big revolutionary rallying cry that Trump is trying to put out. A large right-wing account described as a “Mens physicque bodybuilder, Political Commentator” provided video of Trump lawyer Alina Habba saying in February that “We have flight logs, information, names that will come out.” Expressing the first bit of logic I’ve ever seen from this account, they followed up this quote by saying that “She lied to the American people too.”
She did! They’re right! But also, folks, come the fuck on. Even you know you can’t pretend to be this stupid. A group of Q-adjacent to enthusiastic people who scrounge for every piece of evidence they can find has surely seen the photo I used for this story. Or any of the others of President Donald J. Trump and the famed child sex trafficker who died under potentially mysterious circumstances while Trump was president. If your boogeyman Brandon had taken a photo with Epstein like this then had him die on his watch, MAGA would all coalesce into a single hivemind to bleat how obvious this all is and do a January 6th on Biden’s front lawn every day. But when it’s their Dear Leader very publicly associated with the central cog in their Q-driven vision of the world, apparently that evidence is impossible to find because of the dreaded deep state. The cognitive dissonance has been difficult for this Epstein enthusiast group, yet still manageable up to this point. Pictures are one thing, but Trump’s DOJ telling them that they were wrong and they need to move on with their lives? That has clearly fractured their unreality to a degree.
This seems like a big deal in these nascent days of betrayal by a man who Gawker reported was on Epstein’s flight logs. Media Matters detailed how much of the right-wing backlash right now is centered on Attorney General Pam Bondi, as if a TV lawyer somehow has commanded control over the entire deep state in just a few months. Scrolling through my poisoned Epstein searches confirms this, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is a big target too, as the more Q-adjacent folks are digging a rabbit hole around the images of her supposedly lying to them without wearing her usual cross necklace. Few have gone directly after Dear Leader yet, as the cognitive dissonance holds and the ‘Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed’ cult logic that drives MAGA is still running strong. But this does not look like something that is going to go away quietly or even at all, especially with Elon Musk threatening to weaponize his millions to steal Republican voters while posting memes and emojis alleging that the Trump administration is covering up Epstein’s network, weeks after he posted then deleted messages saying Trump is on the Epstein client list.
To be clear, there is no confirmed “Epstein client list.” The flight logs that Gawker uncovered are perhaps the strongest thread to pull on this notion outside of his little black book that first surfaced in court in 2009, and there are a lot of damning accepted facts about Epstein like how he was a convicted sex criminal who trafficked young women and children and hung out with two presidents and one of the richest men in the world, among other ultra elites in Western society. But the elites’ connection to his crimes has always been hazy, and this is where the Epstein mystery lies. The Miami Herald has done yeoman’s work to advance this story, detailing the horrific crimes committed against a litany of young victims as well as Epstein’s financial connections and murky legal affairs. There is real fire under the smoke that has been billowing off this man’s name since it first came into the public’s consciousness, and Trump just fired another plume up in the air.
Rolling Stone reported that the “Trump Admin Braces for MAGA Revolt Over Epstein Memo,” quoting a Trump administration official in saying “They’re gonna be so mad at us.” Reporters Miles Klee and Asawin Suebsaeng asked this official if the administration’s attempts to tamp down the backlash has worked, and they simply said “No.” Again, MAGA is demonstrating a sort of unprecedented logic here. This conclusion is so transparently contradictory from what team Trump was hyping when they came into office that even Steve Doocy’s idiot son playing the role of a reporter at Fox News was able to do journalism and pin Trump’s Press Secretary down.
DOOCY: The report says there’s no Epstein client list. So what happened to the Epstein client list that the attorney general said she had on desk?
LEAVITT: She was saying the entirety of all the paperwork was on her desk
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 7, 2025 at 11:44 AM
The face Doocy makes after throwing Pam Bondi’s quote back at Leavitt is a terrific summation of MAGA right now. There is a “you can’t possibly expect us to be this stupid” vibe to Trump’s right-wing collaborators. There has always been a tacit understanding at the base of this political movement that they are hypocrites, but that’s okay because it was in service of unseating a transparently hypocritical status quo empowered by a lot of people uncomfortably close to the world’s most famous sex trafficker.
One of those people is their Republican demigod who of Epstein said, “I was his closest friend,” and now Trump is the one in charge of the Epstein investigation. He told his base that contrary to everything they were promising just five months ago, there’s no case here, while providing them with a video seemingly missing a minute of footage the night that Epstein died as proof that he wasn’t murdered. What the heck is MAGA supposed to think? It’s like Trump is trying to send them down a Q rabbit hole in his own backyard. For an administration comfortable telling you that the sky is red and you’re a communist for thinking otherwise, this kind of ham-fisted and transparent flip flop that even offends MAGA’s sensibilities is just bizarre.
Yes, this is fascism under the Stephen Miller presidency, but don’t ever lose sight of the fact that Trump is the dumbest, most self-destructive politician we have ever seen, and he is fumbling the bag to some degree with his biggest group of sycophants now using words like “betrayal.” MAGA has dedicated a significant portion of their lives trying to expose the globe’s elite sex criminals covering up what really happened with Jeffrey Epstein, and a lot of them are clearly processing the possibility that Trump just did.
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