MAGA abandons Trump over his Epstein flip-flop: 'Say goodbye to midterms.'

"Nail in the coffin," right-wing influencer Evan Kilgore posted on X. "I won't defend this. I'm disgusted."

Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images

Donald Trump infamously announced during the Republican primary in January 2016 that he could do anything, including commit murder in broad daylight, without losing a single voter. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" he boasted at a campaign stop in Sioux City a week before the Iowa caucus. "It's, like, incredible."

I’ve been wondering since then whether there are any limits at all to that statement, but until now, it’s proven true. MAGA stood by Trump through dozens of sexual assault allegations and 34 felony convictions by a jury of his peers. They didn’t care that he never build the border wall he promised to make Mexico pay for. Trump has altered a hurricane map with a sharpie pen, fired air traffic controllers, admitted to being duped by Putin, tanked the economy and stock market on purpose, threatened to invade Canada and Greenland, and taken a sledgehammer to cancer and Alzheimers research. He recently marked the lowest approval numbers of any president in 80 years—but none of the above has been a bridge too far for MAGA loyalists.

So it’s been pretty stunning this week to find out that there is actually a red line for some Trump supporters—at least for the QAnon wing of MAGA, who genuinely believed there was some kind of elite Democratic pedophilia ring that Trump had been sent by God to expose, and for those regular right-wing influencers who believed Trump when he promised he was going to release the “Epstein list” (an allegedly incriminating client list for convicted child rapist and billionaire Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein), thereby exonerating himself and implicating Bill Clinton (et al.) once and for all. Attorney General Pam Bondi had gone so far as to tell Fox News in February, just after Trump’s inauguration, that Epstein’s client list was already “sitting on my desk,” which had MAGA foaming at the mouth to see their conspiracy theory about the Clintons having murdered Epstein be proven true.

Then Trump and Elon Musk have their epic public break-up a few weeks ago, which culminates in Musk declaring that Trump is on the Epstein list, and things start to get weird.

Musk deletes the tweet hours later after some backlash, saying he realized he’s gone too far (lol), but he can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Half of why MAGA is so desperate for Trump to release the Epstein list is to make themselves feel better about Epstein and Trump’s high-profile bromance, which looks prettttttyyyy bad for the guy who’s supposed to be sent directly from heaven to bust up the Democrats’ pedo cabal.

Convicted and civilly liable rapist bros being pals

One would think that if Pam Bondi really had “a truckload” of Epstein files on her desk, as she announced in February, and that if Trump felt confident about not being in them, Elon’s bombshell accusation would be a great time to make good on Trump’s campaign promise to release those files and clear all this up. Instead, the president makes the stupidest possible move and has Bondi announce on Monday that the Epstein files don’t actually exist at all, and that the DOJ found no “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”—despite Epstein’s assistant Ghislaine Maxwell currently sitting in jail for child sex trafficking. Bondi and Trump both look like sketchy liars, the situation stinks to high hell, and MAGA begins melting down about it, despite Trump’s desperate please for everyone to change the subject.

Over the course of the next five days, Trump tries and fails to shut his base up about Epstein. So he decides to change the story again on Saturday and claim the Epstein files do exist, but that we can’t see them because Obama, “Crooked Hillary,” and “the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration” wrote them. His rambling Truth Social post, which got heavily ratioed by his own supporters, is below for those who have the stomach to read it:

This is when MAGA really loses it and starts posting videos of themselves burning their hats.

Neo-nazi Nick Fuentas declares the movement dead.

Evangelical Christian and QAnon leader Mike Flynn turns on Trump…

A Texas Republican delegate tells Trump to “say goodbye to midterms;” right-wing influencer and former Turning Points USA leader Evan Kilgore posts that he’s “disgusted" and “can’t defend this.” MAHA surrogate Jessica Reed Kraus ends her latest newsletter like this:

And on and on and on.

I will say that I am stunned to find out A) that MAGA has a line at all, and B) that this is where the line is, of all places. A 20-year-old billionaire sex trafficking case that most people already knew Trump was probably at least a little bit implicated in.

And while I appreciate the attempts, by some, to appear to have found some kind of moral clarity on this issue—to insist in earnest that looking away from child sex trafficking would be hypocritical, as a party that has long claimed to care about it—all of that is complete bullshit. The one and only reason MAGA is apoplectic about this Epstein situation is that they had been promised the satisfaction of nailing the Clintons, once and for all, and that moment of joy and sweet revenge that finally seemed almost within their grasp has turned out to be a mirage.

RIP, MAGA.