Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, and the revolt it has sparked among the MAGA faithful, has pulled off something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally underestimated his followers’ intelligence. The president reversed himself on a matter so crucial to his base, and offered an excuse so flimsy, that it raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history.
Over the past decade, Trump’s hold on his fan base has been a mysterious and unchanging fact of American political life, the inspiration for innumerable journalistic diner safaris and the source of agonized self-reflection on the left. Trump understands that his most committed fans will believe almost anything he tells them. Any discomfiting fact is instantly dismissed as a lie coming from the “Radical Left” (Democrats), the “FAKE NEWS” (non-Republican-aligned media), the “Deep State” (any government statistic or official finding), or “RINOs” (whenever a Republican has the temerity to question him).
Crucial to this cultlike epistemology is that Trump himself defines what is true, and can alter the nature of that reality at his whim. A journalist or politician may go from Well Respected to Failing Loser and back again as many times as needed. Extravagant promises (to give everybody “terrific” health care, to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, to bring down grocery prices) could be issued and then memory-holed.
The MAGA-endorsed conspiracy theory that Epstein was blackmailing powerful people with tacit government support was not crazy. (Unproven, yes. Impossible, no.) The crazy part was that this theory had been assimilated into the pro-Trump worldview. Epstein had been Trump’s buddy. Trump had publicly acknowledged more than 20 years ago his awareness of Epstein’s preference for young girls. Epstein came into the custody of the Justice Department and died in prison in 2019, while Trump was president. Trump said “I wish her well” of Epstein’s lieutenant, Ghislaine Maxwell—an odd thing to say of an alleged child sex trafficker. In a rational world, the Epstein saga would have been an obsession of Trump’s enemies, not his supporters.
And so Trump naturally must have assumed that his promises to release Epstein’s records would go the same way all his other promises had: straight into the memory hole. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in February that she had the fabled Epstein client list on her desk, and that she would release it. After the Department of Justice claimed that there was no client list at all, Trump instructed his followers that the issue was now dead. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he scolded a reporter after the DOJ announcement. “This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.”
When his supporters continued raising questions, Trump floated a new line on Truth Social: The files did exist, but they were anti-Trump disinformation created by the Democrats.
“Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?” he wrote. “They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?”
Not only did this new line blatantly contradict the repeated promises to release the files that Trump’s allies had made, but it was not even internally consistent. Barack Obama had concocted the Epstein files to smear Trump … but Democrats had refused to make them public, for some reason? And because the “Radical Left Lunatics” had kept them secret, Trump needed to do the same thing?
But whatever. Trump’s lies often lack even the veneer of plausibility. His devotees have generally not made him work very hard to maintain their trust. You could almost picture Trump lazily mouthing the same tropes—“fake news,” “Russia, Russia, Russia”—expecting the same result.
Except this time, Trump pushed the buttons, and nothing happened. Trump fans just grew angrier; how could Trump pretend that a pledge to uncover a sinister cabal had never mattered at all?
Why, exactly, this reversal dismayed his cultists when a thousand precious reversals had bounced right off them is hard to say precisely. One possible reason is that, compared with promises about normal policy issues, the Epstein saga is both easier to understand and generates unusually strong feelings; the sexual abuse of underage girls is more visceral than more abstract harms of, say, taking away peoples’ access to health insurance, and this subject is central to the QAnon movement. The Epstein saga also seems to hold a load-bearing place in the populist mythology, explaining why the “deep state” is out to get Trump. Casually retconning the narrative, so that the Epstein files cease to be the secret document that will expose Trump’s enemies but rather become a libel written by those enemies, is too wrenching a shift for even them to accept.
It is probably too much to expect that Trump’s base will defect en masse. But we can be thankful for small victories. After years of complete impunity, Trump has finally discovered that his power to brainwash his idolaters is finite.
The post Trump’s Brainwashing Powers Are Finite appeared first on The Atlantic.
