Michelle Goldberg

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Trump’s Fans Forgive Him Everything. Why Not Epstein?

July 14, 2025

Donald Trump seen from behind. An American flag is in the background.

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Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

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Over the past squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent supporters. They’ve been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even after she was put in ICE detention. “I will support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America great again.”

So it’s been fascinating to watch a vocal part of Trump’s movement revolt over his administration’s handling of files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex-trafficking financier who died in jail in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. Running for president, Trump promised to release the Epstein files, which some thought would contain evidence of murder. “Yet another good reason to vote for Trump,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, wrote on social media. “Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

Some of the influencers who now staff Trump’s administration built their followings by spinning wild stories about the case, promising revelations that would lay their enemies low. Epstein’s client list “is going to rock the political world,” Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the F.B.I., said in September. Appearing on Fox News in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked whether her department would release “a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.” She responded, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Now she says there was no such client list. Last week the Justice Department and the F.B.I. released a memo saying that Epstein killed himself and no more information would be forthcoming: “It is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” Trump has implored his followers to forget about Epstein, writing, in a petulant Truth Social post, that the files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary” and various other purported deep state foes. Let’s “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote.

But he was wrong: Lots of people care. Trump’s followers responded to his attempt to wave Epstein away with uncharacteristic fury and disappointment. Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign over Bondi’s handling of the case. Epstein was a major subject at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, a conservative conference that began on Friday in Tampa, Fla. Speaking from the stage, the comedian Dave Smith accused Trump of covering up “a giant child rapist ring.” The audience cheered and applauded.

Having nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in danger of being consumed by one. In many ways it’s delicious to watch, but there’s also reason for anxiety, because for some in Trump’s movement, this setback is simply proof that they’re up against a conspiracy more powerful than they ever imagined. “What we just learned is that dealing with the Epstein Operation is above the President’s pay grade,” posted Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and podcaster. An important question, going forward, is who they decide is pulling the strings.

Epstein obsessives are right to be suspicious about the weird turns the case has taken. So much about it feels inexplicable, including the sweetheart plea deal Epstein got in 2008 and the fact that he was apparently able to kill himself despite being one of the most monitored inmates in the country. Even if it turns out that a review of the case doesn’t implicate anyone who hasn’t already been charged, it should be a scandal that Bondi misled the public about the existence of a client list.

But the administration lies all the time; that alone doesn’t explain why this issue has so tested the MAGA coalition. To understand why it’s such a crisis, you need to understand the crucial role that Epstein plays in the mythologies buttressing MAGA. The case is of equal interest to QAnon types, who see in Epstein’s crimes proof of their conviction that networks of elite pedophiles have hijacked America, and of right-wing critics of Israel, who are convinced that Epstein worked for the Mossad, the country’s spy service.

Trumpism has always been premised on the idea that he’s warring against dark, even satanic globalist forces, and within the movement there’s a fierce yearning for the cathartic moment when those forces will be exposed and vanquished. The Epstein files were supposed to show the world, once and for all, the scale of the evil system that Trump’s voters believe he is fighting. “Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things,” Steve Bannon said at the Turning Point conference.

The way Trumpists have made this case a cause célèbre can seem bizarre to outsiders. After all, Trump’s friendship with the sex-trafficking financier has been widely documented. Epstein’s best-known victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club. And Trump has his own history of alleged creepiness around underage girls; several teenage contestants in one of his beauty pageants accused him of deliberately walking in on them when they were undressed. As Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said at a rally this weekend, “Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?”

But I’ve always seen the fantasy of Trump as a warrior against sex trafficking as a way for his followers to manage their cognitive dissonance about his obvious personal degeneracy. To believe that they are on the side of light while championing a man of such low character, Trump’s acolytes have had to conjure an enemy of vast and titanic evil and invent a version of Trump that never existed.

Among those on the right who believe there’s an Epstein cover-up, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself. That, after all, would require a re-evaluation of his integrity and their judgment. But they still take for granted that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful men and then blackmailing them and that he was killed so he couldn’t talk. Now they have to figure out why Trump won’t give them the information they long for. The most logical explanation, said Tucker Carlson on his podcast last week, is “that intel services are at the very center of this story, U.S. and Israeli, and they’re being protected.”

This notion has become so widespread that Israel’s government tried to address it. “There is no evidence — none — that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of Israel,” wrote the Israeli minister Amichai Chikli in an open letter addressed to Turning Point’s head, Charlie Kirk. But Chikli couldn’t resist using the case against his more centrist political enemies, saying he wants to understand Epstein’s connection to “former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who both appear in previously published Epstein-related documents.”

This will not, I suspect, put theories about Epstein as a Zionist operative to bed. Without them, Trump’s followers would have to admit that they were duped, that MAGA has never been a Manichaean battle against sex criminals and that Trump glommed onto the Epstein story only to help him win an election.

The entanglement of the Epstein drama with American debates about the Jewish state portends some dark developments. I won’t pretend to know whether Epstein ever worked for the Israelis, though I can’t imagine Trump covering for them at any cost to himself. I’m worried, however, about people blaming Jews for the strange and unresolvable parts of his sordid story. Scroll through X, and you’ll see they already are.

It’s worth recalling the origin of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” which was coined in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, an author of the book “When Prophecy Fails.” He and his co-authors studied an apocalyptic U.F.O. cult, with an eye to what happened when the spaceship didn’t appear as predicted. Some members, disillusioned, left the group. Most, however, maintained or redoubled their commitment. The problem for Trump is that some of his followers need to choose between their commitment to him and to the narrative that justified his rise.

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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

A version of this article appears in print on July 16, 2025, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: MAGA’s Cognitive Dissonance on Jeffrey Epstein.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/marco-rubio-2652807547/?rs=182

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after decades of bowing down to large corporations, prominent Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio are now attacking corporate America for coming out against the suppression bills that have come from state legislatures in Georgia, Texas, Arizona and many other states. Rubio angrily attacked "woke" corporations in an op-ed published by the New York Post on April 25. And liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg slams the Florida senator's empty posturing in her April 27 column.

In his op-ed, Rubio wrote that large corporations need to be called out for "bending a knee to woke progressive craziness." According to Rubio, "Corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it's only gotten more destructive with time."

Goldberg, in response, writes, "This analogy is slightly confusing, because usually, corporate polluters should expect no pushback whatsoever from Republicans. But Rubio wants us to assume that his party thinks dumping toxic waste is bad."[good one]

The Times columnist goes on to say that Rubio's posturing is meaningless in light of how much Republicans have kowtowed to Corporate America.

Goldberg explains, "If Republicans actually wanted to scare corporations into quiescence on social issues, they have a bunch of policy options. They could, for example, support President Joe Biden's plan to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% to help fund infrastructure. It was 35% before Donald Trump's tax cuts. But Rubio's not going to do that: He described Biden's corporate tax proposal as part of 'a radical agenda full of left-wing priorities.'When Senate Republicans unveiled their counterproposal on infrastructure, it called for 'protecting against any corporate or international tax increases.'"

During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Rubio was a blistering critic of Donald Trump. But after Trump won the primary and the general election, Rubio — not unlike Cruz and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — flip-flopped and became much more Trumpian rhetorically. And the empty anti-corporate rhetoric in his Post op-ed is full of Trump-like pseudo-populism.

According to Goldberg, "Rubio is following a model pioneered by Trump: rail against big corporations, occasionally bully those that defy you, but ultimately, put their profits and influence first."

Goldberg points out that Rubio has no problem with corporations until they embrace "cultural liberalism" in some respect.

"Last month," Goldberg observes, "Rubio did support the union drive by some Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, framing it explicitly as payback for Amazon's cultural liberalism. 'If Amazon thinks that conservatives will automatically rally to do its bidding after proving itself to be such enthusiastic culture warriors, it is sorely mistaken,' he wrote in a USA Today essay. But the union drive, which Amazon opposed ferociously, failed, and Rubio isn't willing to back the kind of legislation that would make unionization easier…. The most Rubio is willing to do is to make a temporary rhetorical alliance with workers driven by spite."

Goldberg discussed her column during an April 28 appearance on slamming Rubio once again for being hypocritical in his "sudden" disdain for Corporate America and described his rhetoric as "toothless."

The Times columnist told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and guest Willie Geist, "I think it's prompted by Georgia and other instances where corporations have criticized right-wing legislation…. He's not talking about esoteric language policing. He's not talking about human resources fads that some people object to; when he talks about wokeness, he's talking about voting rights. And he is really, really angry that companies, after all the deference that they've been given by the Republican Party, would intervene in political issues on the side of Democrats."

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