MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything

The first week of July was one that shook MAGA World — the solid base of the 77 million voters who last fall restored the Donald Trump regime to power — to its very core.

In Washington, high-fiving over the July 4 signing of Trump’s 940-page mega-bill gave way to realizations that the measure cuts $155 billion for Medicaid in rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for the 47th president, and could close scores of hospitals in those counties. In Texas, also on Independence Day, a dead-of-night flash flood that killed at least 129 people, with more still missing, raised questions about an anemic response from the regime’s Federal Emergency Management Agency, which laid off hundreds of call workers in the middle of the crisis, and about a now probably dormant Trump scheme to end FEMA altogether.

But the untimely death that rattled and threatened to rip wide open Trump’s MAGA political coalition didn’t happen among the little girls from Camp Mystic in the rising floodwaters of the Guadalupe River.

No, the fatality that matters in MAGA World, it turns out, happened nearly six years ago in a Manhattan federal jail cell — the death of sex fiend financier Jeffrey Epstein.

A holiday weekend Sunday night news dump from the Trump Justice Department stunned many of the president’s supporters by seeking to shoot down conspiracy theories that have animated millions on the far-right since the time of Epstein’s death, and which at times were fully endorsed by Trump’s inner circle.

Epstein — whose friendships included the likes of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Britain’s Prince Andrew, and (cough, cough … more on this later) Donald Trump, as well as CEOs and other bigwigs, and who was accused of sex trafficking underage girls — wasn’t murdered, but died by suicide when he was found hanging in his cell, the Justice memo said. There is no secret “client list” of bigwigs — even after Attorney General Pam Bondi had implied earlier this year it was sitting on her desk — and Epstein was not blackmailing his elite friends, the memo also insisted.

The memo instantly caused heads to explode in MAGA World. Despite the thousands of trees that were chopped down in 2024 to inform voters that the presidential election hinged on egg prices, the reality is that millions of voters were motivated by their belief that a Trump restoration would confirm all their wildest, bitter beliefs about cosmopolitan elite Democrats and their immorality and disdain for “the real America.”

“Show us all the Epstein client list now!!” the son of the once and future president, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted in July 2023, as his dad’s campaign was heating up. “Why would anyone protect those scum bags?” He was hardly alone. Elaborate Epstein conspiracy theories were common among the web of right-wing podcasters who played a critical role in building enthusiasm for Trump; one of them — longtime close ally Dan Bongino — was named deputy director of the FBI (and he’s now said to be so distraught he may be leaving the job).

So it shouldn’t have been surprising that MAGA rage over the splash of cold water from Bondi’s Justice Department has been not just instantaneous but sustained. “Who’s still willing to demand real answers?” a frustrated “Pillow Guy,” Mike Lindell, veteran pusher of Trump conspiracies like the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud, tweeted on X. And as the days passed, some key influencers widened their critiques to other issues like last month’s bombing of Iran, or the rising deficits in the mega-bill. “‘Maybe he will stop these wars.’ No,” raged comedian podcast bro Andrew Schulz. “‘Maybe we will see what’s up with this Epstein [bleep].’ No.”

Trump’s peeved, churlish reaction so far has only made matters worse. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump lashed out at a reporter’s question during a recent cabinet meeting. “Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.” As the MAGA meltdown worsened, the president took to his Truth Social site on Saturday night with a lengthy rant that claimed “the Epstein files” are actually a product of his political enemies like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and complained that “now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.”

The thing that’s never made any sense about any of this is that, for a time in the 1990s and 2000s, no bigwig was closer than Trump to Epstein, who once even called the Manhattan developer “his closest friend,” and claimed to have played a key role in hooking up Trump with his current wife, Melania. You’ve probably seen the notorious video of Trump and Epstein ogling women and laughing together at Mar-a-Lago. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump famously told New York magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Gross.

Needless to say, left-leaning social media, especially Bluesky, has looked a lot like the iconic Michael Jackson eating popcorn at the movies meme this last week. That said, the Epstein story has so many wrinkles that literally no one — right, left, or center — knows exactly what to make of it. Among liberals, it feels like half are crowing this confirms MAGA’s deranged obsession with conspiracy theories, yet the other half kind of agrees with MAGA that there is indeed a cover-up, and what they are hiding is new evidence of Trump’s unsavory ties with Epstein.

» READ MORE: Texas flood exposed America’s warped priorities | Will Bunch Newsletter

The Epstein saga is a serious story. The amazing journalism by my friend and former Daily News colleague Julie K. Brown exposed the warped justice system that nearly let him off the hook. And unlike its bastard cousin QAnon — a popular yet utterly made-up conspiracy about elite liberal pedophilia — Epstein’s crimes really occurred; we just don’t know the full extent, or everyone who was involved.

Still, I wasn’t initially planning to write about Epstein because, in a moment of un-American raids on immigrants by masked secret police and GOP boasting about its new concentration camps, a sex scandal — even one that touches Trump — didn’t feel so important. But watching the MAGA implosion in recent days has made me realize I was wrong — as are the parade of Democratic elected officials who go on MSNBC to declare that any story not about Medicaid cuts is “just a distraction.”

Indeed, the current Epstein moment is maybe the best manifestation I’ve seen of the cancer eating away at American democracy, and you can’t treat a disease until you diagnose it. Understanding that the Epstein theories are the very cornerstone of the MAGA movement ought to be a wake-up call for top Democrats still struggling badly to understand the 2024 results, and who seem trapped in their 1990s “It’s the economy, stupid” theory of politics that has gone the way of dial-up internet. In 2025, it’s the conspiracies, stupid — and here’s what the other side needs to understand.

First, status and culture trump everything — even things that might hurt you economically. The writers and academics who’ve most deeply researched the most pro-Trump regions consistently find cultural resentments — the idea that government bureaucrats, out-of-town journalists, or impersonal doctors think they’re better than you — are the greatest motivator.

When I attended my first Trump rallies in 2016, I was struck by how my questions about the job market only triggered rants about how much the voters hated CNN. The distrust extends to everything — even badly needed aid from Democratic administrations. Federal dollars that could have bought warning sirens in Kerr County, Texas — ground zero for the deadly July 4 flood — were scorned by local residents because they carried the imprimatur of Joe Biden, who led what one reject-the-money advocate said was a “criminal, treasonous, communist government.”

In that mindset, a story like Epstein is everything. It’s proof that everything they’ve felt in their guts about the immoral hypocrisy of liberal elites has been true all along — even if that means obsessing on the late financier’s friendship with Clinton and ignoring his ties to Trump. To a significant chunk of Trump’s base, the promise of wiping this stain rationalizes granting “red Caesar” dictatorial powers to Trump and supporting a “cruelty is the point” regime, even if the damage falls a lot heavier on Home Depot parking lots than on Wall Street. To true believers, bursting the Epstein bubble feels worse than the odds of losing Medicaid.

But the Epstein blowout also shows how Democratic leaders and many top pundits fail to take into account the power of a huge yet insular right-wing media establishment — fueled by podcasters like Schulz and the pre-FBI Bongino — that steers our politics in ways they never learned about in Ivy League poli-sci classes. Things like deep Republican cuts to Pell Grants will never puncture this bubble, which seems obvious, yet is something that the Democrats who keep chasing the center fail to grasp.

In the short run, many of these voters are untouchable for Democrats, or anyone who more generally supports democracy. I do believe that long-term strategies like boosting higher education as a public good, more civics and news literacy in high schools, and universal public service “gap years” could help, if we have the patience to try.

But the real short-term play for Democrats is to understand that American voters are moved by their values, not by dollars and cents. The masked thuggery on public display from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents in Southern California and elsewhere has revulsed millions of voters — even some Trump voters … at least the ones who really did think they were voting for lower egg prices — as so profoundly un-American that public opinion on immigration is rapidly shifting.

We can stipulate that the Medicaid cuts in the Trump bill are also unconscionable — sick people, including Trump voters, will die — but this argument won’t resonate with the average casual voters as much as stating clearly that America should not have concentration camps, or even pressing Bondi on her lies about Epstein.

Eventually, staking the high moral ground creates an environment where real economic change — like the young voter crises around rent and childcare that propelled Zohran Mamdani in New York City — can be wrapped in. But self-proclaimed political experts still running around claiming, “It’s the economy, stupid,” need to rethink who should be wearing the dunce cap.

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