Since last Monday, when the Justice Department announced it would not be releasing documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein and his 2019 death in a New York prison, the MAGA movement has been up in arms.
Prominent voices like Megyn Kelly are calling on President Donald Trump to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino reportedly skipped work on Friday after a vicious fight with Bondi over the non-release. And a Truth Social post from Trump calling on his allies to stop talking about Epstein has not yet put out the fires.
“No issue has exposed the underlying fault lines in the MAGA tent quite like the so-called Epstein files,” wrote Ian Ward, Politico’s reporter covering the right.
Part of it is anger at hypocrisy. The MAGA base is deeply invested in the idea that Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring — that he did not merely abuse young girls on his own, but rather pimped them out to other rich and powerful people. Pretty much everyone in the administration, from Trump down, promised to get to the bottom of this story — and now, they’re doing nothing.
“The conspiracy theorists go into the government, and they come back out and they say, ‘Nothing to see here.’ There could not be a bigger betrayal, and that is why the heads are exploding all over the right right now,” Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies right-wing media, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.
But there’s something even deeper at work here. In telling his supporters to move on from Epstein, Trump is betraying a fundamental structure of his political movement: its populism. He is showing, in short, that MAGA is not truly a movement of the people against the elites, but rather, a politics that revolves around Trump himself.
The personal nature of Trump’s political appeal is why he has managed to weather so many previous political storms, from the Access Hollywood tape to his several criminal indictments. While there’s a lot of heat right now surrounding Epstein, I expect the outcome to be similar.
But the current controversy is important nonetheless. It is powerful evidence that the notion of Trump as an authentic populist, rather than an opportunistic one, should be buried in Jeffrey Epstein’s grave.
Jeffrey Epstein as MAGA’s defining populist issue
Populism is one of those terms that people throw around very loosely. The most precise definition, to my mind, comes from a prescient 2004 article by the political scientist Cas Mudde called “The Populist Zeitgeist.”
Mudde saw, long before Trump, that the future of Western politics would be shaped by populist politics. By “populism,” he did not just mean generic anti-establishment politics, but something more specific: “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”
The key word here is “ideology.” Populism is not merely a rhetorical style pitting elites against the people, but a genuine belief that this is the true axis of political conflict. In the populist worldview, the people have a unified set of common-sense beliefs (“the general will”) that would fix politics if implemented. The only reason it is not happening, for the populist, is that malign elites are preventing the people and their champions from holding power.
In a populist movement like MAGA, the “people” are defined narrowly as only those “good” or “true” Americans — meaning typically, though not exclusively, white rural Christian Republicans. Trump presents himself as their champion against the malign forces of globalist liberalism, personified by the Washington political establishment and coastal cultural elite (a construction that easily and regularly shades into antisemitism).
This kind of populism is, as Mudde notes, morally binary; they are telling a story not of normal political contestation in a democracy but of epic conflict between the forces of good and evil. And on the right, Jeffrey Epstein became a stand-in for evil. His sexual viciousness and habit of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful — everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates — cultivated a deep belief that everyone in the American elite class was secretly abusing children. These were not reasonable people that you might lose to in a fair election, but crooks who had corrupted the whole system in order to serve their own dark desires.
For many MAGA believers, then, Epstein was not just one story among many. It was the master story of American politics: the skeleton key unlocking everything that they believed Trump was supposed to be fighting against.
“What about the Epstein story is so uniquely infuriating?…It’s the frustration of normal people watching a certain class of people get away with everything every single time,” Tucker Carlson said in a Friday speech at the Turning Point USA conference.
Though Trump had embraced conspiracy theories about Epstein since the moment he died, it was always clear that he was playing with fire. Trump and Epstein were friends who partied together in New York and Florida — a connection well documented in the public record. So is Trump’s own history of sexual impropriety, ranging from credible rape and assault allegations to barging in on a changing room full of teen beauty pageant participants.
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in a 2002 interview with New York magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Given these facts, Trump’s decision to turn on Epstein theorists during his second term is unsurprising — maybe even suspicious. Does Trump’s name appear in some of the files, as his former ally Elon Musk has alleged?
But Trump’s dismissal is also ideologically revealing. In his Saturday post on Truth Social trying to defuse the controversy, he completely abandoned populist anti-elite rhetoric. Instead of pandering to the base’s conspiracy theorists in some fashion, he ordered his followers to stop asking questions and trust the people in power.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump wrote.
For Trump, the Epstein story is not about a corrupt elite that he has vowed to fight but rather yet another chapter in the story of the liberal establishment persecuting Donald J. Trump in particular.
“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,” he wrote.
Instead of telling a populist story about the people versus the elite, he’s now telling a story of conflict between two groups of elites: the evil liberals forced out of power and the good Trumpists who now control it. Now that his movement controls Washington, he wants his followers to abandon their skepticism of power and simply trust that the government has their best interests at heart.
“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” Trump wrote in characteristic all-caps.
This is not the logic of populism, but rather of personalism: a version of authoritarian politics that invests all power and authority in a single individual. This has always been central to Trump’s appeal but has reached new heights after the failed assassination attempt last year.
“God miraculously spared the president’s life — I think it’s undeniable — and he did it for an obvious purpose. And his presidency and his life are the fruits of divine providence. And he points that out, obviously, now all the time — and he’s right to do so,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a Tuesday morning press conference.
Ideologically, personalist movements revolve around the celebration of the great leader’s singular abilities and talents. Their unique brilliance gives them the ability to know what’s right for the people and give it to them, even if the people themselves do not yet understand the workings of the leader’s mind. They are essentially infallible; if they make mistakes, it’s because they were misled by incompetent advisers (what Russians call the “good tsar, bad boyars” maneuver).
The Trump movement has deftly blended populism and personalism. When Trump was under four separate criminal indictments during his time out of office, he portrayed it as an attack on the MAGA movement in general by corrupt elites.
“They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump said in a 2023 speech, a line that would become a popular slogan among the MAGA faithful.
But in the Epstein case, populist and personalist logics are coming apart at the seams. The populists are furious that Trump is abandoning the people’s crusade against the pedophile elites. Meanwhile, Trump supports Bondi’s decision to withhold the Epstein documents and is furious that his personal judgment is being questioned by his supporters.
Now, I don’t think this means we’re on the verge of a true grassroots MAGA uprising against Trump. Trump supporters are clearly angry now, but I doubt this rage will lead to a durable approval ratings collapse among Republicans.
Every time someone has predicted such a rebellion in the past, they’ve been proven wrong — a testament to just how successfully Trump has convinced his base that faith in Trump the person is the ultimate expression of populist politics. He will either ride this out or give a concession, like Bondi’s head, that fits the “good tsar/bad boyar” personalist script. Trump’s own leadership position will remain unchallenged.
The Epstein story is defined by shadows. But now, it’s shedding a peculiar kind of light — one that helps us see that populism is not the most fundamental logic of Donald Trump’s movement. It is his personalism — his ability to sell himself as the avatar of revenge against everything his base hates about contemporary America — that makes MAGA such a cohesive and durable force in American politics.
