The cult leader's hold weakens
Trump's bungled Epstein coverup demonstrates that he's past his prime.
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Donald Trump’s clumsy attempt to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein has driven a wedge through his base. But his flailing is a symptom of a deeper problem: the cult leader has begun to lose control of the flock.
America’s would-be dictator won’t fall because he’s acting like the mastermind of the “deep state” conspiracy he’s coached his fervid followers to believe. But the cracks in the Trump regime — which have been growing since he reentered the White House six months ago — are all but certain to widen into dangerous crevasses.
Trump has never been a broadly popular politician, and is by far the least popular person to be inaugurated as president twice. His political resilience derives from his power within the Republican Party — strength grounded in his singular grip on MAGA, which finds its only parallel in charismatic dictatorships like those of Putin and Mussolini.
A decade out from Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, today’s Republican “leaders” know nothing other than surrender. But his bungled, increasingly desperate Epstein coverup indicates that his skills as a cult leader are declining.
The murder myth
In January 2016, Trump infamously “joked” that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” He was not taken seriously at the time, though the statement has since come to be taken almost literally by some pundits.
But the implication of Trump’s braggadocio — that his complete hold on “his” supporters is baked in, no matter what — is false. Like all cult leaders, Trump’s “control” of his people has always been grounded on an assiduous and even obsessive attention to their psychic needs, wants, and proclivities. While Trump is no genius, he’s a gifted performer, and he’s devoted huge amounts of mental energy to understanding the desires of those who worship him.
It is a measure of how good Trump was at pandering to his cult that his work has often been all but invisible to the vast majority of “savvy” observers, who are wont to declare that his enduring connection with MAGA amounts to something akin to magic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A cursory review of Trump’s now lengthy career as a national politician demonstrates two things. First, that his personal obsessions with power, money, misogyny, and self-aggrandizement of a cartoonish nature is a constant, but lurks as a potential vulnerability, not the source of his appeal. And second, that his violence-tinged promises to his followers are constantly evolving in accordance with their wishes.
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Trump is rarely the source of his conspiratorial notions. He instead draws and then popularizes them from the always active bowels of his raging cult. This is true of his persistent pandering to performatively sadistic xenophobia, his amplification of antivax paranoia and other forms of “health” quackery, and his abiding focus on culture war issues like transphobia and demonizing diversity.
All of these reprehensible ideas — including the challenges to President Obama’s citizenship that “launched” Trump’s political career as his TV star was fading — came from what is now Trump’s base. But in each case, Trump was the assiduous curator of the paranoid theories, hatreds, and obsessions of others. His attention to the fringes of popular culture, and his recognition of just what tidbits appeal most to resentful white baby boomers like himself, has long been second to none.
The cult leader as chameleon
It’s a measure of Trump’s abilities that he has rarely come close to losing the appearance of control over his herd, but there have been previous moments where his status as leader of his extremist movement has been open to question.
Perhaps the most notable example came in 2021 — and it had nothing to do with January 6, when feckless Republicans like Kevin McCarthy wrongly assumed the failed putsch would dethrone Trump. It came months later, in the summer of that year, as antivax conspiracism moved to the center of MAGA world.
Trump, the braggart, had long touted the false claim that he “invented” the covid vaccine. So he was in a potentially difficult position when a would-be usurper, Ron DeSantis, moved swiftly from being a vaccine advocate to positioning himself as the most extreme anti-vax conspiracy theorist among major American politicians.
But Trump skillfully headed off the threat. By mid-2021, he had stopped touting his purported role in creating the lifesaving vaccine, and instead promoted the “freedom” of his supporters to risk their lives by refusing it. It was a measure of Trump’s brilliance as cult leader that he managed to seamlessly transform himself from the father of the new vaccine into a fully paranoid opponent of even long-accepted ones like the polio jab.
Trump similarly outflanked DeSantis’s effort to become the leader of the “anti-woke” contingent of MAGA. After DeSantis began grounding his bid for the GOP presidential nomination on a promise to “reject woke ideology,” Trump outdid his rival by making bigotry of all shapes and sizes central to his appeal. And since he retook office, Trump’s anti-woke battle has rapidly moved from rhetorical to actual in arenas ranging from hospitals to universities.
The reptile is poisonous
Trump’s chameleon-like ability to remake his political appearance was always at risk of reaching its limit where the right-wing conspiracies focused on Jeffrey Epstein and his vile criminal exploitation of young girls are concerned.
After all, in reality, Trump was not only among Epstein’s closest friends at the time his sex trafficking ring was at its height, he himself has a history of sexual abuse allegations (including an adjudicated case). So Trump trying to become the “truth teller” on Epstein inevitably risked confronting his cult members with the deeply repugnant reality of their leader, including his association with the very evils they attribute to their enemies.
Trump must have concluded that he had little choice but to pander to his base and their QAnon-ish mythology about Democrats engaging in industrial scale child abuse. But while the Trump of just a few years ago would have recognized the danger this particular conspiracy theory posed to him and planned accordingly, the 2025 version did the precise opposite.
Not only did Trump bring into his administration right-wing extremist media figures who made massive sums amplifying Epstein-centered conspiracy theories, but he placed two of them (Kash Patel and Dan Bongino) at the top of the FBI. He also did nothing as arch panderer (and absolute fool) AG Pam Bondi tried to outflank Patel and Bongino by promising to release every item in the DOJ’s “Epstein files.”
Trump did not require a meeting with Bondi to learn that those files contained references to him. How could they not, given that Trump hung out regularly with his pal Epstein during a period that was central to his multiple indictments? But it was not until the blowback threatened him that Trump recognized his problem, and his response over the past several weeks has only confirmed that his magic touch isn’t what it once was.
Initially, Trump responded by lashing out at his cult for believing the conspiracy theories he had assiduously promoted to them, labeling them “weaklings” and declaring that they would be excommunicated if they continued to believe the QAnon gospel, which he called “bullshit.”
It was as if the frustrated leader was saying: You promised I could commit murder without consequence, so what is the big deal about my association with the world’s most notorious pedophile?
After that gambit failed, Trump turned to recycling old conspiracy theories, like the “Russiagate hoax” that jumped the shark long ago, apparently believing that yelling lies more loudly would drown out the clanging alarm bells. That effort failed as well.
Now Trump has bizarrely turned to serially confessing to disturbing aspects of his long relationship with Epstein. Recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he broke with Epstein because the sex trafficker “stole” young girls from his Mar-a-Lago spa, including the then 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein sex abuse victim who later committed suicide.
As a former Trump aide has observed, the implications are far from helpful for her former boss. Trump has not explained why he thought Epstein and his associate Maxwell were trolling Trump’s club looking for underage girls to “steal,” given that Epstein had no club of his own.
This self-immolating response to the Epstein crisis is very unlikely on its own to be enough to break Trump’s deep hold over his cult, but the debacle is a stark demonstration of his waning abilities. Suddenly, the smoothly operating machinery that allowed Trump to appear as the master of his movement is clanking and creaking. And this could not come at a worse time for him, as his deeply unpopular policies and erratic “governance” are making him more and more unpopular.
Democrats, and indeed the majority of Americans who are not Trump supporters, should be happy at the growing cracks in his previously rock solid base. But at the same time, there are reasons to be concerned — the most important being that Trump is the president of the United States and will be for the next several years.
After all, Trump has already demonstrated that he will attempt to make up for his diminished competence with ever increasing rage and by lashing out at enemies. So as his hold over his cult diminishes, and his political losses grow, he is likely only to get angrier and more willing to take out his resentments on his true arch enemy: the American people.
That’s it for today
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Yes, Trump is 'losing it'.
A few reasons perhaps: Epstein case which is hard to shake. He is a clear sexual predator that should have been registered as such long ago. It is no longer a case of simply being friends with one, or even being one, the question is how much he was in business with Epstein, providing a front (Escort Service, Casinos, Resorts, Beauty pageants...) for distribution of the girls, as well as recruitment of them...
Trump has fallen into the classic trap of Dictators, where the paranoia and the cycle of ever stronger control and cruelty to assure him of his safety is never enough. Isolation with only his most 'loyal' talking to him, assuring him of his brilliance, even when he tells people he has brought drug prices down "fifteen hundred percent". Trump has a history of doing what the last person told him to do, and often as not that person these days is Stephen Miller, and others who are not much better. He is very old and his health is getting worse every month, including his mental health.
His connection to his MAGA fan base is fracturing in part because he no longer talks to them. Since he started his campaign in 2015, Trump has held rallies. He talked to them and listened to their feedback. He was a master of the 'cold read', saying something and as the audience responded either flipping away from it or doubling down on it. Since the 2024 election, The only rally Trump has had was his inauguration. Sure, he shows his face, but those are staged events with the press as the primary interaction and some of those have fallen flat as well. Increasingly he is getting booed, such as at the recent WWE event, and we should note his 'stealing of the spotlight' when a trophy was presented to a team. He no longer listens to the press, he shuts them down, dismisses them, but still they get the last word on the air. Murdoch has turned on Trump, and neither of them want to admit how much Trump is a creation of Murdoch, two evil old men.
Trump has no competent people left in his administration except Stephen Miller, and his 'competency' is reserved for evil.
To review: Sexual Predator / Pedophile, Spiraling control freak, Isolated, Surrounded by incompetents, ruling by fear, and getting booed...
The question is not if Trump will implode, the question is when and how much more damage will he do in the process?
Good to see Aaron doing some grunt work at the key-board. When I took a subsciption to this (well worth reading substack) I had in mind supporting Aaron the writer rather than Aaron the editor of other writers. Remember to keep your hand in mate!