Trump risks losing his most loyal followers over Epstein conspiracy handling, health care cuts

Globe and Mail

17-07-2025

What caused the Big Bang? How could Roy Halladay possibly pitch so deep so often into so many Blue Jays baseball games? Why was Stonehenge built? Who is portrayed in Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? Are there odd perfect numbers? Will the Maple Leafs ever win a Stanley Cup again?
To the list of the universe's most nagging mysteries, let's add one more: Will Donald Trump's hold on his MAGA coalition ever loosen?
This week's surprising answer: Maybe.
And all because of a man who died and a piece of legislation that didn't.
The Trump administration's failure to produce a list of clients of Jeffrey Epstein, who specialized in liaisons with young women and who provided sexual partners for powerful men, combined with second thoughts about the 'big, beautiful' tax and spending package the President signed July 4, have provided the strongest test yet of the survivability of the MAGA insurgency.
Trump criticizes his own supporters as 'weaklings' for falling for Epstein 'hoax'
For nearly a decade – through political setbacks, the scorn of the American political establishment, sex scandals, the imprisonment of rioters at the Capitol, dozens of indictments against Mr. Trump himself – those ties never loosened. Mr. Trump and his legion of followers seemed to be bound together with the immutability and permanence of the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of Windsor. (It was signed in 1386 and still is in force.)
But suddenly, astonishingly, maybe even inevitably, the survival of Mr. Trump's political base is the question of the moment.
As it has been scores of times.
On each occasion, Mr. Trump has prevailed, the crisis of the moment has disappeared, the threat to the coalition has abated, and the President and his legion of followers have renewed their vows.
But although Bruce Springsteen crooned nearly a half-century ago that 'you can't break the ties that bind,' there now are signs of strain.
They come from a handful of Republican lawmakers, committed Trump allies, who believe the 'big, beautiful' budget strikes too deeply at medical assistance for the poor and support for rural hospitals. The leader of the movement to repeal those elements of the measure and to double subsidies for rural hospitals is Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who gave rioters a fist-up salute during the rebellion at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Americans most likely to suffer from the Medicaid cuts and the crisis of rural medicine: the very onetime Democrats whom Mr. Trump has lassoed into the Republican Party.
Republicans consider changes to Trump's request for $9.4-billion in spending cuts
The signs also come from those who believe that documents in the care of the Justice Department are hiding explosive sexual details about the very captains of the financial and political establishment that the MAGA coalition reviles. (Some of the President's most ardent critics want those details revealed as well, for Mr. Trump himself is known to believe in marriage but not to be a fanatic about it.)
This contretemps suggests a new maxim for American political life: Live by the conspiracy, die by the conspiracy.
Mr. Epstein died six years ago, apparently by his own hand, in prison, though many in the MAGA coalition believe that dark forces were involved in a hushed-up murder. This rebellion in the Trump ranks – already frayed by the President's order to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites in contravention of the coalition's isolationist instincts – was heightened by Attorney-General Pam Bondi's assertion on Fox News in February that a list of the Epstein clients was 'sitting on my desk right now to review.' In recent days she has insisted there was no such review because there was no such list.
Mr. Trump rushed to Ms. Bondi's defence, saying, 'He's dead for a long time' and dismissing the controversy as 'pretty boring,' arguing that the whole thing was made up by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and 'the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.'
Mr. Epstein's lawyer agreed there were no hidden secrets. 'Jeffrey Epstein never prepared a list of people that were involved with any sexual activities,' Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law professor, said in an interview. 'That never existed. And he wasn't murdered and there are no sex tapes. So there's not a lot to it.'
Even so, conservative influencers are aghast. Right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Loomer are agitated. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene are demanding more transparency.
On Wednesday the President assailed 'weaklings [who] continue forward and do the Democrats work, don't even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don't want their support anymore!' He later called Republicans who persist in emphasizing this issue 'stupid' and 'foolish.'
But the issue – 'the only conspiracy Trump considers boring,' in the characterization of The Atlantic – refuses to die.
On Wednesday afternoon, the respected Quinnipiac University Poll found that, by a nearly four-to-one margin, Americans disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files. Among Republicans, 40 per cent approve while 36 per cent disapprove.
Even so, some of the President's most visible associates are keeping alive a conspiracy theory about a man Mr. Trump insists 'nobody cares about.'
The irony is that this affair involves one of the vulnerable elements of the Trump ascendancy – the truth – and, from the viewpoint of those troubled about the administration's response about the Epstein matter, reprises an assessment of mendacity that until now has been the exclusive province of the President's critics.
From the 1787 Potemkin Villages of Russia and president James K. Polk's 1846-48 war against Mexico to the 1963 British Profumo sex scandal and George W. Bush's 2003 insistence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, the truth has been a vital issue in world politics. The broader issue prompted Gilbert and Sullivan, in H.M.S. Pinafore, to have Buttercup sing that 'things are seldom what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream.'