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On July 6, a bombshell dropped on the MAGAverse. Axios reported via leaked Department of Justice documents that the government investigation found no mystery in the death by suicide of disgraced society pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and that he kept no client list.  

An empty bombshell, then, but the news of no news threw President Trump’s base into turmoil, because conspiracy theories around a Democratic “deep state” cover-up of the Epstein files were for years stoked by some of Trump’s most prominent deputies. MAGA online influencers, stung by betrayal, led nonstop viral coverage of the fallout on all platforms. Trump was brutally ratioed by his followers on his own social media platform, Truth Social, for suggesting that their obsession with the Epstein files was misplaced. One of his posts—“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”—generated more than forty-eight thousand replies, many of them angry or confused.

The backlash to Trump fed a secondary market in gleeful commentary from liberal podcasters and Substackers including Jon Stewart and Jim Acosta. MSNBC ran a seven-minute segment on the split in the MAGA base. For a week, every interactive surface was dominated by the Epstein files.

The episode is turning into the first existential crisis the Trump administration has faced from its own supporters, who’ve stuck with him through all the other gaffes, security breaches, legal transgressions, and economic disasters during his first six months back in office. In 2016, Trump famously boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He had a point—one of the most remarkable aspects of the MAGA movement has been how ironclad it has proved to external attempts to create division. Until now. 

Why is this time different? Trump is now confronting the outcome of a media ecosystem he invented, one based on panicky, consensus-squashing conspiracy theories. The role of conspiracy theories, provably untrue assertions, and flagrant lies has been ontological to the development of the MAGA movement. Stop the Steal, QAnon, chemtrails, mind control through vaccination, weather seeding—every event got paired with a narrative that departed from or flatly denied reality. Attention and ratings governed every part of Trump’s policy, up to and including hokeypokey tariffs, which are being announced, applied, delayed, and re-implemented, acting as much as market theater for pump-and-dump schemes as economic policy.

The seeds of the Epstein obsession were sown by the QAnon conspiracists who believed that Trump was in fact Q, the messiah who would save the world from an evil ring of liberal child abusers. In truth, Epstein’s lenient treatment and gilded circle of friends, including Trump, went largely unnoticed by the MAGAsphere while they pursued stories about Washington pizza parlors harboring pedophile rings. Epstein’s crimes were uncovered by conventional journalists, notably Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald; her reporting almost singlehandedly reopened the Epstein investigation and led to his eventual 2018 prosecution.

Yet Dan Bongino, a former podcaster and media personality who is now deputy FBI director, built up a MAGA audience with a constant feed of Epstein theories. Bongino is the person perhaps most emblematic of Trump’s fracture with his base. The Guardian wrote earlier this week that Bongino’s humiliation at being part of the DOJ’s “nothing to see here” decision adds to an already fraught time for him; on a recent appearance on Fox News, he confessed tearfully that his public service role has required him to “give up everything.” Pam Bondi, the MAGA attorney general, is also the target of much online wrath. At the White House in February, Bondi handed out ring binders marked “The Epstein Files” to a group of MAGA influencers including Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, Rogan O’Handley, and Jessica Reed Kraus. Those influencers are now using their combined tens of millions of followers to leverage their own fury at Trump about his abandonment of the Epstein matter. 

Kraus’s Instagram account has detailed every twist and turn in the scandal over the past week to her 1.3 million followers. On X, Posobiec posted repeated calls to release the files to his 3.1 million followers. Charlie Kirk, the founder of far-right student activist group Turning Point USA, attended a conference on the Epstein files over the weekend, then, after stating that he was “going to trust my friends at the government to do what needs to be done” on Monday, reversed course and assured his viewers that he would not, in fact, stop talking about Epstein. Other TikTok and Instagram accounts once loyal to Trump highlighted the Wired exclusive analyzing the doctored video footage of Epstein’s cell door during the hours surrounding his death, and called out Fox News for assiduously ignoring the story. 

When Trump sidelined legacy media organizations after taking office earlier this year, he did so as part of a loyalty test. He banned the Associated Press from briefings for refusing to designate the Gulf of Mexico as the renamed Gulf of America. Meanwhile, he stacked his cabinet with former Fox News hosts and social media personalities. 

The irony is that the replacement of these “difficult” journalists in the White House press room with supposedly supine MAGA influencers is now causing the Trump presidency more existential strife in five days than he’d encountered in five years of scrutiny from legacy media. The loyalty of the MAGAsphere and its alternative media ecosystem to Trump is being tested by its own ratings. An unreasonable movement, it turns out, cannot easily be reasoned with.

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