The Weekly Sift

For years, Democrats have imagined that someday Trump’s dupes might return to reality and turn against him. But what if they could turn against him without returning to reality?

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If you were a 2024 Trump voter, the last half-year has given you all kinds of good reasons to reassess your decision.

• He didn’t reverse inflation like he said he would.
• He didn’t end the Ukraine War “in 24 hours” like he said he would.
• His Big Beautiful Bill increases the deficit he said he’d reduce.
• He never found the millions of dangerous migrant criminals he said existed, so instead ICE is rounding up gardeners and dishwashers and moms.
• Thanks to his Medicaid cuts, your rural hospital might close soon.
• His on-again-off-again tariffs make it impossible for you to manage your small business.
• Even though you worked hard and thought your office was doing something worthwhile, you lost your government job.
• He fired the people you need to process your application for veterans benefits or Social Security.

And so on. As far as we can tell, though, hardly anybody in MAGA World cares about this kind of stuff. To the extent that Trump has lost support, it’s mainly among independents. Against all evidence, his base voters continue to believe he’s on their side, and everything that indicates otherwise is fake news.

What seems to be breaking through to them, though, is the Trump administration’s handling of information about Jeffrey Epstein, the rich pedophile who died in his prison cell in 2019. The case has exactly zero effect on their lives, but this is what they care about.

What upset them? Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo claiming there is nothing to see: The famous Epstein “client list” that she said was “on my desk” a few months ago … well, it never existed. (Does her desk still exist? Was she ever really attorney general?) So there is no “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”. And Epstein’s death was a jailhouse suicide, just like the official report said at the time.

The DOJ and FBI say in the memo that no “further disclosure” of Epstein-related material “would be appropriate or warranted.”

So: case closed. If you’ve been obsessed with Epstein, find something else to think about.

Worse, Trump himself has backed up Bondi on Truth Social.

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. … Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.

But if we shouldn’t “waste Time and Energy” on Epstein, who “nobody cares about”, why have Trump and his people kept talking about Epstein for years?

I feel silly writing about this, because I have never cared about Jeffrey Epstein or the various conspiracy theories about his activities. Apparently, he was a rich man with a lot of rich and powerful friends. He induced a number of underage girls to have sex with him, and perhaps also with his friends. Some believe that he kept evidence of these statutory rapes to blackmail his one-time “friends”, and that their influence is what kept him out of prison so long. He was arrested in 2005 and convicted in 2008, but served an embarrassingly trivial sentence. He was arrested again in 2019 and died in his jail cell a month later. The official report on his death says that he committed suicide, but rampant speculation says that he was murdered to keep him from implicating the people he procured underage girls for.

Honestly, I’ve never cared. I feel sorry for the girls he abused. I’m glad he was arrested and I’m glad his girl-friend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail. If anybody has solid evidence that he had “clients” who also abused the girls, I’d like to see them punished too. If that group includes prominent Democrats or Hollywood bigwigs, so be it. (That’s an attitude I have towards a lot of alleged crimes: If there’s some kind of evidence, have at it.) But there’s a lot of injustice in the world, and for me this case does not stand high above many others. I have no theory about what “really” happened to Epstein, and no interest in forming one.

But not so in the fever swamps of MAGA. For these folks, Epstein was a real-life case that validated the wild and otherwise baseless conspiracy theories of Q-Anon.

Their core belief is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters in league with the deep state is operating a global child sex trafficking ring and that Donald Trump is secretly leading the fight against them.

The Satanic cabal supposedly included the Clintons and all sorts of other people. And someday soon, Trump would bring them down by unleashing “the Storm”

when thousands of people will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or face military tribunals. The U.S. military will then take over the country, and the result will be salvation and utopia.

This theory was always nutty, going back to the gun-toting guy in 2016 who showed up at a DC pizza place thinking he was going to liberate the children being held captive in the basement the building didn’t have. And Trump — a known friend of Epstein and a sex offender in his own right — was maybe the least likely person in the world to be cast in the savior role.

But being in a cult means never having to say you’re sorry. Over the years, the repeated failure of Q’s predictions disillusioned a lot of his followers. However, Mike Rothschild, who wrote the book on Q-Anon, says:

QAnon as a movement based around secret codes and clues and riddles doesn’t so much exist anymore. But it doesn’t need to exist anymore because its tenets have become such a major part of mainstream conservatism and such a big part of the base of people that reelected Donald Trump.

For years, Trump has been happy to let these crazies anoint him as their messiah. He “re-truthed” their memes.

More recently, though, the conspiracy theory seemed to be coming back to bite him. Elon Musk claimed to have seen the “Epstein Files” — though what that had to do with the job he was supposedly doing to cut government spending isn’t clear — and said that Trump was in them. “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” Musk deleted that post after Trump threatened his government contracts.

Plus, the MAGA natives were getting increasingly restless. Trump had said he would release whatever files the government had on the Epstein case. His nominees talked about them in their confirmation hearings. So where were they? It was time to produce the evidence that would prove those Q-Anon claims once and for all.

And the answer is … oh, never mind. Nothing to see here. Let’s all go back to some other fantasy, like voter fraud or the migrant crime wave.

Trump has told his base to turn on a dime before, and they have. Appointees like Bill Barr or Jim Mattis are “the best people” until they say something Trump doesn’t like, and then they were always suspect. Elon was a “genius” until he became “crazy”. Deficits are a problem until they aren’t. Any hint of Joe Biden or his family profiting off their government service is “the Swamp”, but Trump and his family making billions from foreigners investing in their crypto schemes is just good business. And so on.

But this time seems like a bridge too far. Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon can’t go there. Dan Bongino is unhappy.

In order to restore peace in MAGA World, Trump will probably have to throw Pam Bondi under the bus, despite the FANTASTIC JOB she’s been doing. It wasn’t him, Trump’s cultists will say to comfort each other, it was her.

But then what? A new AG, one untainted by Bondi’s nothing-to-see-here blunder, does what exactly? Releases something, obviously. But what?

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is said to have given this advice to then-Vice-President Richard Nixon: If the people believe in an imaginary river, don’t tell them there isn’t one. Promise to build them an imaginary bridge.

It’s time for Trump to deliver his imaginary bridge over the Epstein controversy. How will he do it?

Meanwhile, what should the rest of us do? The worst thing we can do, I think, is get drawn into the argument. The real issues in America today are

• the continuing march of fascism, and the complicity of Congress and the Supreme Court in subverting American democracy
• the vast economic inequality in our country, and government policies that keep making it worse
• climate change

In the face of all that, I have no theory about Epstein and no interest in forming one. Anybody who has evidence of some unprosecuted crime should feel free to pursue their investigation, but I have other stuff to do.

If the MAGA movement wants to tear itself to pieces over this, that’s all to the good. Make popcorn and enjoy the show. But they’ll eventually put their movement back together, and they’ll do it with an explanation that makes as little sense as everything else they do. We can hope that the friction will scrape away a few cultists, who finally realize that Trump has been playing them for fools all along. A few. Probably not that many.

Meanwhile, there are real issues to worry about. I have no time to waste on imaginary rivers or the bridges that might cross them.