The MAGA Meltdown Over Trump's Jeffrey Epstein Scandal | Opinion

The most striking feature of the Jeffrey Epstein drama playing out across the Trump administration is MAGA followers' shock at learning that Donald Trump was a longtime associate of Epstein's. Some even begin to wonder whether the president's name might appear in any documentation that may still exist about Epstein's alleged abuse of underage girls.

The MAGA movement is no stranger to sex abuse scandals—for years, it's invented ever-more salacious ones to pin on its political enemies rather than admit Trump's proven misdeeds.

Edgar Maddison Welch shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., on December 4, 2016, just weeks after Trump had been elected president for the first time. As Q-Anon emerged in early 2017, "Pizzagate" became one of the central tenants of the cult.

By 2020, the theory had gone beyond merely claiming that Democrats and financial elites like Bill Gates were running pedophile rings, and turned into a full-blown delusion that they were torturing children to jack up their hormones and then draining them of their blood to extract psychoactive, life-extending substances. As Right Wing Watch documents, uber-Trump cultist and Q-Anon theorist Liz Crokin explains in one of her videos:

Adrenochrome is a drug that the elites love. It comes from children. The drug is extracted from the pituitary gland of tortured children. It's sold on the black market. It's the drug of the elites. It's their favorite drug. It is beyond evil. It's demonic. It is so sick.

When then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney used the word "pizza" in a televised cabinet meeting, Crokin and other Trump cultists took the remark as confirmation of the "reality" of children being being tortured and having their adrenochrome "harvested" at a pizza restaurant in a D.C. suburb.

"President Trump and his staffers are constantly trolling the deep state," Crokin said of Mulvaney's reference.  "That's President Trump's way of letting you know Pizzagate is real and it's not fake. They're—he's constantly using their words against them and throwing it in their face and God bless him, it's amazing."

Much of this served to distract from a real sex scandal Republicans would rather not discuss: Trump's years-long and reportedly close association with Jeffrey Epstein, and the young women—one who claimed, but later retracted, that she was 13 at the time—who have accused Trump of sexual assault.

Now, the old proverb about the dangers of "riding the tiger" is haunting Trump.

Whataboutisms like, "But what about the Clintons?" and "What about Biden's laptop?" aren't working this time. People of all political stripes aren't willing to overlook the alleged abuse of youngsters.

Many Trump supporters have spent years emotionally and socially invested in a mythos that depicts the president as a brilliant, competent, and upstanding man with the best interests of the working class at heart. They've merged their own sense of self with the persona of Trump they've seen, heard, and internalized from within the carefully controlled right-wing information bubble.

Admitting betrayal or deception requires admitting they were wrong, which comes with deep psychological costs—thus the anguish and conflict we're seeing among the Trump base.

As MAGA icon Candace Owens offered this week in a wounded voice, "What is happening now is it seems like you think your base is stupid. That's how I feel. I feel like Trump thinks his base is stupid."

The big question now is whether the swamp of right-wing media can process the news in a way that will turn it into simply another passing-and-soon-forgotten Trump scandal, like his abuse of E. Jean Carroll, the Access Hollywood tape, or the 34 felony convictions arising from his payoffs to Stormy Daniels for their extramarital tryst.

Trump's ability to survive the Epstein saga will also depend on whether his administration can release anything that his base may consider credible. Original videotapes or photos that are not clearly doctored, first-person testimony by Ghislaine Maxwell should she ever be allowed to speak with the press or Congress (Republicans just blocked the latter), or more former teenage victims going on the record could spell doom for his relationship with his base.

On the other hand, Trump's efforts to squelch the conversation, strong-arm the press, and threaten reporters who ask Epstein questions may work. More concerning, if cornered Trump may decide to do something truly risky—something that could crash the economy or lead the nation to war—to change the subject.

If there's anything we know about Donald J. Trump, it's that he's a survivor. His tenacity and thirst for revenge are legendary, and if he makes it through this there will be hell to pay, at least in some quarters.

Hopefully it won't be our entire nation—or world peace—that has to suffer the consequences.

Thom Hartmann is a four‐time winner of the Project Censored Award, a New York Times bestselling author of over thirty books, and America's #1 progressive talk radio show host for more than a decade. His latest book is The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.