What Even Donald Trump Can’t Steal
It looks like even MAGA has its limits
Donald Trump is a thief, and perhaps the most exceptional thief in world history. I mean, the man stole an entire country right out from under the noses of the most freedom-loving people ever to walk the Earth. Or at least that’s how we see ourselves.
That’s why everyone has such a visceral reaction to him; either he inspires fealty and devotion, or the exact opposite, but no one is undecided, at least not anymore. And the most faithful of his minions are the red-hatted and intellectually-challenged people who claim membership in the MAGA coalition.
MAGA has become an entity unto itself, with its own ideology and fiercely held – and quite odd – beliefs. The first and foremost of these beliefs has always been that whatever Donald Trump says is true, even if it’s the opposite of what he said ten minutes ago. This is one of the most frustrating things for the rest of us to deal with, the constant neck-snapping reversals and shameless hypocrisy. Trump changes his beliefs more often than he changes his nasty orange undies, and MAGA has always followed him right down every rabbit hole – from birtherism to nuking hurricanes to injecting bleach to cure Covid.
But now we’re learning that there may just be one thing that MAGA will not let Trump steal, one belief he cannot force them to upend. As it turns out, you can take a MAGA’s money, and you can take a MAGA’s future. But you cannot take away a MAGA’s favorite conspiracy theory, and it’s beginning to look like not even Trump himself can tell MAGA to forget about Jeffrey Epstein.
But that’s what Trump’s DOJ tried to do last week, releasing a memo that claimed there was no such thing as an Epstein “client list” and no evidence that Epstein was blackmailing anyone, much less people in power. It was a rejection of some of the most deeply held beliefs MAGA holds about an all-powerful “Deep State” cabal running everything in our government. And if MAGA has anything that could be called a “core belief” then the Deep State’s existence and influence would be it.
To say MAGA has been taking this rejection of its core beliefs badly would be an understatement, and MAGA personalities have been attacking each other in public ever since. And Trump – he’s been throwing out every bit of distraction he can think of to try to get folks to talk about anything else, but it isn’t working. Even attacking Rosie O’Donnell and threatening to take away her citizenship didn’t do the job.
Personally, I have no idea what is and isn’t true when it comes to the Epstein story. But I know Trump is terrified of the story coming out, and he is doing everything he can to make us talk about something, anything else. While we know very little about what may be in the “Epstein Files” we know for certain that Trump wants everyone to forget about it, which means it must be very damaging for him. So as MAGA continues to tear itself apart, I and many like me will spend our time on the sidelines, just watching and doing our best not to interrupt.
Trump tried to steal MAGA’s favorite conspiracy theory, and for the first time that I can remember, he got caught. And what will happen next is anyone’s guess.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.