MAGA HAS ALREADY MOVED ON FROM EPSTEIN

I think Justin Baragona is right:

More than a week after Donald Trump’s base looked like it might be fracturing over the Justice Department’s “no client list” Jeffrey Epstein memo, MAGA world got its “perfect offramp” in the ongoing saga thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s latest bombshell.

... the WSJ’s story ... offered MAGA pundits and influencers the chance to join Trump in lambasting their shared enemy – the mainstream press.

The Journal story says that Trump sketched an image of a naked woman for an Epstein birthday greeting, and toasted Epstein with an imagined dialogue between Epstein and himself. Trump says he doesn't draw sketches, even though several of his sketches have been made public over the years. Trump is on stronger ground when he says that the message doesn't match his writing style, which we all now know from thousands of social media messages, as well as Trump-era government documents, which seem partially written by Trump himself. The prose of the Epstein greeting doesn't seem Trumpian, but please note that Trump had published four books by the time of the 2003 greeting, none of which he wrote himself, and he would publish three more in 2004, the year The Apprentice first aired. So he was used to working with ghostwriters.

Nevertheless, as Baragona notes, the semi-plausible claim that the greeting is fake seems to be uniting MAGA influencers around Trump:

With the president going off about how he was “going to sue his a** off” over the “FAKE letter,” whatever schism that had formed in the MAGA universe over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files quickly melted away as prominent conservative personalities jumped onboard the media hate train....

“This is the dumbest attempted hit piece I’ve ever read,” fumed Megyn Kelly, who just days earlier had blasted Fox News hosts and MAGA influencers for trying to move on from the Epstein controversy....

Former “first buddy” Elon Musk, who has said the administration’s conclusion that Epstein died by suicide and didn’t maintain a “client list” was the “final straw” for him, also came to the president’s defense over the WSJ's “hit piece.” ...

Podcaster and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, who has been at the forefront of pushing the administration to release more Epstein documents amid the MAGA meltdown, unleashed a series of posts raging about the WSJ while peddling conspiracies about the paper’s reporting.

So Epstein and his circle are no longer the enemy. The media is the enemy.

What's MAGA's new focus? It might be this, the subject of the two top stories at Gateway Pundit right now:

A story that featured prominently at Breitbart this morning explains:

Republican lawmakers delivered a thunderous response following Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s explosive declassification of documents proving the Obama administration deliberately manufactured intelligence to create the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative, with revelations that expose what one Republican described as a disinformation campaign against the American people that “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”

The declassified documents reveal that a December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief stated that Russian actors “did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” but Obama administration officials suppressed this assessment and ordered intelligence agencies to create a new narrative that “directly contradicted” their original findings. The bombshell revelations prompted an immediate and furious response from Republican leaders on Friday....

DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE!

New evidence from @DNIGabbard confirms what we’ve long known: The Russia hoax was a political hit job manufactured by Obama officials and weaponized by intel agencies to take down President Trump.

Accountability is long overdue! https://t.co/9NWoeds0nD

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 18, 2025

If you go to the link in the excerpt above, there's not much real news:

“We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” a declassified December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that was set to be published the next day stated.

... intelligence officials said election monitoring combined with the fact that neither vote-counting nor -casting infrastructures were harmed made it “highly unlikely” that any results were altered.

But the Trump-Russia scandal was about efforts to influence voters, not create fake votes or vote counts.

Nevertheless, Gateway Pundit reports that Steve Bannon ranted yesterday on his podcast about incarcerating large numbers of Obama-era officials:

This is how duplicitous they are. This is how guilty they are. Ben Rhodes, Obama, all of them are going to rot in a freaking prison. This is why we got to get on top of this. This is the deep state. This is the coup against Trump. You can see it all right there.

This is all MAGA wants. Trump's voters think they care about child abise, but what they really care about is putting all their political enemies in jail. If they now believe, naively, that this is a more likely route to that end, they're perfectly willing to forget about the Epstein story. Besides, how can the Epstein story give them the satisfaction they want when liberals are expressing disgust at what he and his friends did? MAGA can't side with us -- ever!

This might not be the off-ramp MAGA needs, but MAGA is largely done with Epstein.

ATTACKING ISRAEL: IT'S OKAY IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

You might not have noticed this because of all the attention being paid to the Jeffrey Epstein story, but Donald Trump's ambassador has been sharply critical of Israel recently, in ways that would have led to screaming headlines and loud denunciations if similar messages had been sent by a Democratic administration.

First, there was this story on Tuesday:

The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, on Tuesday called on the Israeli authorities to “aggressively investigate” the death of a 20-year-old Palestinian-American citizen in a clash on Friday with Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, calling his killing a “murder” and a “criminal and terrorist act.”

Mr. Huckabee, who has been vocal about his support for settlement in the occupied West Bank — which is widely viewed as illegal in the international community — used uncharacteristically strong language in his statement condemning the death of Sayfollah Musallet, a young Floridian who had been visiting his family in the area.

“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Mr. Huckabee said.

Responsibility for this killing doesn't really seem to be in doubt -- an NPR story on it was unambiguously headlined "Israeli Settlers Beat U.S. Citizen to Death in West Bank," and even Hakeem Jeffries condemned the killing. But now there's this from Huckabee:

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has threatened to publicly declare that Israel no longer welcomes Christian groups to Israel over what he said was Jerusalem’s failure to approve tourist visas for evangelical missions.

The threat was issued in a letter that Huckabee sent on Wednesday to Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, which was leaked to Hebrew media on Thursday....

Given Huckabee’s longstanding support for Israel and close ties with the current government in particular, the rhetoric in his letter represented a shockingly quick deterioration.

The letter is quite harsh:

“It would be very unfortunate that our embassy would have to publicly announce throughout the United States that the State of Israel is no longer welcoming Christian organizations and their representatives and is instead engaging in harassment and negative treatment toward organizations with long-standing relationships and positive involvement toward Zionism and friendship to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” the US envoy wrote....

“If the government of Israel continues to cause the expense and bureaucratic harassment for the granting of routine visas that for decades have been routine, I will have no other choice than to instruct our consular section to review options for reciprocal treatment of Israeli citizens seeking visas to the United States,” Huckabee warned.

More:

"We would be further obligated to warn Christians in America that their generous contributions to organizations to promote goodwill in Israel are being met with hostility and that tourists should reconsider travel until this situation is resolved with clarity."

But Zohnran Mamdani is still evil, apparently.

Or perhaps the Overton window has moved a millimeter to the left. A couple of days ago, Axios reported that two purple-state Democrats have now criticized Israel (one of them very timidly):

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a moderate Democrat from a swing state, this week slammed the Israeli government for the lack of humanitarian aid in Gaza and violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Slotkin wrote on X:

Another violent week in the Middle East: in Gaza, this weekend brought the death of another 60 Palestinians who were simply seeking food and water for their families. Israel has the responsibility to allow humanitarian aid in — just as the US had the responsibility to allow aid into places like Fallujah. And if President Trump’s hand-picked aid organization can’t get food and medicine to people in Gaza a safe way, Israel has the responsibility to find one that can.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American U.S. citizen to death. This totals 5 Americans killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023 and more than a dozen Palestinians killed by lawless settler violence. It’s hard to understand this lack of accountability by the Netanyahu government as anything other than tacit approval by the state — something that should be treated as abhorrent by all decent people.

This violence has to end. As I saw from my own experience in places like Iraq, democratic governments have responsibilities even when under threat. If President Trump and his team truly want a lasting ceasefire (not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize), they need to extract basic humanitarian and law and order standards now.

That's fairly strong, but this is weak tea:

"There are times when, to me, it doesn't look like [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is prioritizing the hostage situation," Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Axios. "Certainly, there's times when it looks like Hamas does not want a deal."

But maybe it's a start. Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll continue to hear that Zohran Mamdani is a dangerous Jew-hating terrorist who must be stopped by any means necessary.

THE CRAZIFICATION FACTOR IS MUCH HIGHER THAN 27% NOW

A 2005 post from the blog Kung Fu Monkey declared that the popularity of a Republican politician or idea couldn't drop below 27%. It was written in the form of a dialogue, at a time when there was a notable decline in President George W. Bush's job approval rating:

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval.... But I wonder what his base is --

Tyrone: 27%.

John: ... you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Twenty years later, I think 27% is a low estimate. In this decade, the crazification factor appears to be 40%.

Kung Fu Monkey was more or less right about the 27% figure two decades ago. Bush's job approval was between 27% and 29% in eleven Gallup polls in 2008, and dropped to 25% in two polls. He had mismanaged the economy, two wars, and a major hurricane.

Now compare the polling for Donald Trump in the immediate aftermath of his 2020 election defeat and the January 6 insurrection:

Even after January 6 -- which was, briefly, the object of bipartisan condemnation -- Trump ended his term with a 41.1% job approval rating. In that post-January 6 period, he never dipped below 39.3% in the Real Clear Politics average.

In Trump's second term, the public is dissatisfied with his handling of every major issue -- but his approval is above 39% on all of them, according to Real Clear:

Economy: approve 42.9%, disapprove 54.3% (-11.4%)

Foreign policy: approve 42.3%, disapprove 54.5% (-12.2%)

Immigration: approve 46.9%, disapprove 50.4% (-3.5%)

Inflation: approve 39.3%, disapprove 59.5% (-20.2%)

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: approve 42.0%, disapprove 48.8% (-6.8)

And his overall job approval is still in the 44%-46% range. Here are the polls Nate Silver cites:

There's one below 40%, but just barely.

You might be waiting for the Jeffrey Epstein case to drag Trump's poll numbers down further, but the latest polling from YouGov shows that Trump's job approval is 41%, even though 67% of survey respondents have little or no confidence in the Epstein investigations and 40% believe Trump was involved in Epstein's crimes.

(According to YouGov, Trump's approval rating remains at 98% among MAGA Republicans and has actually increased, to 85%, among non-MAGA Republicans. So much for the possibility of signifcant base defections. There is a noticeable decline in support from independents, however, from 35% to 29% this month.)

In establishing a baseline for the crazification factor, the Kung Fu Monkey post cited the 2004 Illinois Senate election, in which crazy Alan Keyes won 27.05% of the vote against Barack Obama. I think the modern election we should look at the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial contest. Even after the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, was found to have posted many offensive and/or sexually explicit messages on a porn bulletin board ("I'm a black NAZI!"), he received 40.08% of the vote. It's hard to imagine a worse candidate than Robinson, but millions of North Carolinians voted for him anyway.

It's comforting to think that all but a quarter of the country could turn against a Republican, but I don't think that's true anymore. Three out of five seems to be the best we can do now.

ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRATS CHOOSE THE LEAST APPEALING OPTION

I found this yesterday in Reddit's Bulwark subreddit, from a poster who didn't know much about the world of podcast bros:

After reading and listening about people like Andrew Schulz, I decided today to listen to Andrew Schulz on my commute this morning.

I was prepared for a bunch of Dem hating but that's not what I got.

What I got was an hour or so of barstooly type humor and some real anger and frustration towards Trump and his administration. And it wasn't all about Epstein. There was a lot about how much Trump defers to Bibi and Israel in general. They were pro-student debt cancellation (with some complaints about how Biden did it of course).

The biggest surprise for me was when they said Trump wasn't being America First, but you know who they did think was being truly America First? Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani.

It's not that they necessarily agreed with Sanders and Mamdani on everything. They liked them directionally. They liked that Sanders and Mamdani were at least speaking to and trying to help normal people.

Maybe the pod bros aren't as non-gettable as I thought.

Young male podcasters generally favored Donald Trump in 2024, but they weren't truly Republican and they're skeptical now. Their target demographic is turning against Trump, but doesn't seem to be turning toward the Democratic Party:

A new CNN poll found 40 percent of men younger than 35 approve of Trump's job performance and 60 percent disapprove.... And 65 percent of men under 35 are dissatisfied with the government's handling of the Jeffery Epstein case, while only 10 percent are satisfied with the information that's been shared.

“You said you were going to show us (the Epstein files), now you’re just being the very thing you said you were going to end,” said Ben, a chemical worker from Battle Creek, Michigan, who asked CNN not to use his last name. “Not as transparent as what I thought.” ...

If given a chance to go back to November, Ben said, "Maybe I just wouldn’t vote,” he said.

Ben attended a standup comedy performance by Theo Von, who helped cement support from younger men with a viral podcast interview of Trump last August. The comedian has since become a vocal critic of the president....

Another fan, 21-year-old autoworker Justin Centers, expressed dissatisfaction with his first-ever presidential vote.

“Completely being honest, I’m a little iffy now,” said Centers, who lives in the Detroit suburbs. “One of the things I primarily voted for was ‘No new wars,’ and unfortunately, that has been a big lie to my face. So, it’s extremely disappointing to see that.”

Some of the young voters who turned Republican in 2024 were Black. As The Washington Post's Perry Bacon Jr. notes, they've shown increasing interest in the GOP -- and in progressive politicians and ideas. The Democratic Party mainstream, not so much.

It has been well-chronicled that more African Americans, particularly younger ones, are voting Republican than in the past. But there are growing signs of another crucial shift — the younger African Americans who remain Democrats are dissatisfied with the party’s center-left establishment and increasingly open to progressive candidates and stances....

Though [Bernie] Sanders, a socialist like [Zohran] Mamdani, struggled to win over Black voters in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, he did much better among the younger bloc. Polls show that younger African Americans are more open than their older counterparts to reducing police funding, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports according to their chosen gender identity and other progressive positions.

Surveys during [Joe] Biden’s tenure consistently showed younger African American Democrats were much less enthusiastic about him than older ones. In the New York race, Black voters ages 50 and older supported Cuomo over Mamdani by a 64-36 margin, according to an exit poll conducted by Change Research. But about 70 percent of Black voters younger than 50 favored Mamdani.

The one political philosophy that doesn't appeal to young voters is mealy-mouthed left-centrism, but that's precisely what Democratic leaders seem to want to give us all. They don't even want the Democratic Party to be a big tent that includes progressives, even though progressives seem to have solved the problem -- winning back young voters -- that the party is paying consultants millions to solve.

Hakeem Jeffries again declines to endorse Zohran Mamdani, saying "I don't know him well." CHRIS HAYES: Why are you not endorsing the guy that won the democratic primary in a contested election in your backyard? JEFFRIES: I didn't get involved in that primary election, and I don't know him well.

[image or embed]

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) July 15, 2025 at 8:03 PM

If the establishmentarians succeed at their top short-term goal -- uniting behind either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams and defeating Zohnran Mamdani in November's general election -- I think they might lose an entire generation of young voters. This is a generation that believes America needs more than incremental change and believes, rightly or wrongly, that both the Trump GOP and the progressive left understand how much change America needs. Both Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have found that many of their supporters also backed Trump in 2024, and I think this is why.

I think these voters might respond to mainstream Democrats if, like Chris Murphy and Conor Lamb, they acknowledge the harm being done by billionaire oligarchs. (Even the anger about Epstein among the young seems like redirected economic rage.) But most of the party mainstream would rather lose billionaire donors than lose this large cohort of voters. I don't think that's a wise choice.

Busy day today -- see you tomorrow.

THIS IS HOW TRUMP THINKS HE'LL TURN THE PAGE ON EPSTEIN?

President Trump is angering his base, and not just on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein, as NBC News notes:

In the course of a few weeks, Trump has faced a surprising level of pushback from prominent supporters as he moved to strike nuclear facilities in Iran, floated a new policy to allow undocumented farmworkers to remain in the United States and castigated allies for demanding more information related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump wants everyone to just stop talking about Epstein -- but if this is his plan to change the subject, he's going to infuriate a large portion of his base again:

President Trump will announce a new plan to arm Ukraine on Monday that is expected to include offensive weapons, two sources with knowledge of the plans tell Axios.

... Sending offensive weapons would be a major shift for Trump, who had until recently been at pains to say he would provide only defensive weapons to avoid escalating the conflict.

... Two sources told Axios they had reason to believe the plan was likely to include long-range missiles that could reach targets deep inside Russian territory, including Moscow.

... "Trump is really pissed at Putin. His announcement tomorrow is going to be very aggressive," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Axios.

If this is what's coming, it could be the foreign policy equivalent of trying to sweep the Epstein story under the rug. As with Epstein, Trump and his propagandists have sold the base on a narrative that's at odds with the facts. The Epstein narrative is that there's a global pedophile network that includes everyone MAGA hates, that's much bigger than just the dozens of elitists on Epstein's flight logs, and that's central to the liberal/commie/globalist actions of the Deep State.

The Ukraine narrative is that support for Zelenskyy is support for (again) the evil globalists. NATO supports Zelenskyy, so he must be bad. Also, Zelenskyy is accused of running bioweapons labs -- a conspiracy theory that has its own Wikipedia page.

In March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials falsely claimed that public health facilities in Ukraine were "secret U.S.-funded biolabs" purportedly developing biological weapons, which was debunked as disinformation by multiple media outlets, scientific groups, and international bodies.... The claim was amplified by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chinese state media ... and was also promoted by followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory and subsequently supported by other far-right groups in the United States.

Marjorie Taylor Greene still believes this. On X a few months ago, she wrote this:

There are bio labs all over the world, like in Ukraine.

They create diseases and experiment with them to create vaccines to be the “cure.”

This Dr Frankenstein science should be illegal because their monster viruses occasionally get out or get released just like Covid then we were all told to take the vaccines while they made billions.

One of the worst crimes against humanity in the history of the world in so many ways.

Even right-wingers who don't believe this conspiracy theory have sided with Trump against Ukraine, because he's Trump, which means we should "trust the plan." (MAGA isn't completely at ease with Vladimir Putin -- many in MAGA still revere Ronald Reagan and distrust Russia -- but they assume Trump, the genius dealmaker, knows what he's doing, and many simply don't trust the Zelenskyy because he's admired by Europeans and American liberals. Also, they believe that the "Biden crime family" made big money in dealings with Ukraine, because, of course, Joe Biden is both a drooling dementia patient and a criminal mastermind.)

Commenters at Gateway Pundit aren't taking the Trump-Ukraine news well, even though the spin there is about Trump as dealmaker ("Trump has announced plans to sell NATO allies US-made weapons and equipment that the alliance can then transfer to Ukraine"):

We have no business being in Ukraine. If Putin was really interested in taking over, this war would’ve been done in a week. The fact that we have shoved billions of dollars of cash and equipment into this fiasco either speaks to our incompetence or some hidden shenanigans going on.

Oh and does anyone else notice that Hunter Biden’s ties with Ukraine haven’t been mentioned in years. YEARS!!

****

Another betrayal by Trump. Our involvement in Ukraine quagmire is growing, not shrinking.

****

Let’s see...the bloated deficit-increasing BBB, pushing amnesty for illegal farm and hotel workers, punting on Epstein info dump, and now this. 🤔

****

Promises made, promises broken.

****

SHUT IT DOWN........Real everyday Americans have NO interest in what they do over there.

****

Dump ukraine.
Make an agreement to normalize with Russia in return for Putin to give back a small part of the gains in ukraine and Russia stop fighting.
TELL ziggy, if another round is fired by ukraine, it will be all on him what happens afterwards.

****

We never needed all these foreign wars. We have Dems.

****

Trump is losing his whole base and setting up 2028 perfectly for the left.

****

Loosing our family fast,he flip flops to much. No more weapons to ANYONE.

And at Free Republic:

Senators Lindsay Graham (R. South Carolina) and Richard Blumenthal (D. Connecticut) were on Face The Nation on Sunday.

They sounded like a preview of what to expect from Trump’s speech later today.

Plus, Trump has endorsed Lindsay Graham for reelection.

This is not what I voted for.

****

... The Military Industrial Complex and CIA has performed a coup over Trump and got their former control of government back from him. And Graham is now proxy Commander in Chief. Looks like Big Pharma and Big Tech has done the same thing.

****

Not sure that BOMBING MOSCOW was what MAGA voted for, but let’s see what happens here.

****

The BBB. I imagine he made a trade off when the sausage had to be made. Lindsay Graham must have helped get the bill passed with a couple other RINOs as long as you screw over the base. RINOs always win.

I actually did not vote for this.

Seems like we were duped more than the globalists. lol

****

Trump has become a Bush on steroids.

Trump cheated on all of his wives. His central foreign policy tenet is "Alienate America's allies." That also appears to be the key to his tariff policy.

Is this the approach he's taking to his base now? They're like wives, allies, or trading partners, so it's emotionally satisfying to hurt them? If so, we could see even more betrayals of the base in the future, and we may be rapidly approaching the moment when Republicans conclude that Trump is failing because he's rejecting conservatism, and what we need in the future is a true conservative, not someone like that RINO Trump.

OH, LOOK, IT'S TIME FOR THE DOWNFALL OF TRUMPISM (AGAIN)

The Trump administration has infuriated the GOP base by failing to release incriminating documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case. David French believes that the anger we're seeing now heralds the eventual death of MAGA:

This moment ... allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.

This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.

But why would that be a problem in the future? There's no risk that any influential voice on the right will ever tell base voters the truth. Right-wing messaging is all propaganda. It's been all propaganda for decades, and it will be long after Trump is gone. Republican voters don't believe "stories they tell themselves" -- they believe stories they've been told. That won't change, and the stories won't become more truthful after Trump is gone.

French continues:

Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line....

Remove that man, and only the grievances remain, and many of MAGA’s grievances are against other Republicans. The G.O.P. coalition contains pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine factions, internationalists and isolationists, normie Republicans and wild conspiracy theorists.

Yes, but pro-vaccine Republicans eagerly vote for anti-vaccine Republicans, internationalists eagerly vote for isolationists (who usually aren't genuine isolationists, as we saw when Trump bombed Iran), and with a few exceptions (such as Mark Robinson), normie Republicans flock to the polls to vote for conspiracy theorists (Kari Lake, for instance, lost the Arizona governor's race in 2022, but by less than a percentage point).

And it's odd that French credits Trump with the ability to "direct everyone to fall in line," because only a few paragraphs later he writes:

Trump himself isn’t immune from attack. As part of his divorce from the MAGA movement, Elon Musk has claimed that Trump and his longtime ally Steve Bannon are in the Epstein files. “How,” Musk posted on Tuesday, “can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

By Saturday evening, Trump had enough. He posted a long screed on Truth Social that declared his support for [Attorney General Pam] Bondi — he said she was doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!” — and then bizarrely claimed that the Epstein files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” In a pointed reference to [FBI Director Kash] Patel, he said that the F.B.I. should be focused on investigating “Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, the Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting thugs and criminals,” rather than “spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

Judging from the early response online, MAGA is not satisfied.

That's because Trump doesn't always determine what MAGA believes. MAGA turned against vaccines long before Trump did -- he continued to speak favorably about the COVID vaccines that were developed during his first administration until booing crowds persuaded him to stop. Trump also followed other right-wing influencers on subjects such as DEI and trans rights (recall that in 2016 Trump said that Kaitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice in Trump Tower, a few months before he waved a Pride flag at a campaign rally).

The Republican base defers to Trump on most things, but not everything, and Trump doesn't have a monopoly on the development and nurturing of right-wing grievances. That's because the right-wing grievance machine predates Trump's entry into politcs by decades, and will exist long after he's gone.

I'm not sure who precisely will decide what right-wing voters believe on most issues, but the decider won't necessarily be a politician. After Ronald Reagan left office, Rush Limbaugh and other radio talkers determined the party line. Newt Gingrich picked up the slack in the early 1990s, and then Fox News seized control of party messaging, along with radio talkers and Matt Drudge, all of whom shared messaging control with the George W. Bush administration for most of the following decade. Once Barack Obama won the presidency, Fox and the talkers controlled the message along with the new Tea Party.

Trump seems to have been the party's sole leader for a decade, but he actually shares the leadership role now with the likes of Chris Rufo, Charlie Kirk, Chaya Raichik, and the Heritage Foundation, and the messages are channeled through Fox (for old people), purely ideological podcasts such as Steve Bannon's War Room for the middle-aged, and bro podcasts and social media posts for the young.

And all this is bankrolled by billionaires who largely stay out of the public eye but ensure that culture wars steer voters to the GOP and the GOP directs money into their pockets.

There's no crackup coming. Whoever hates "the libs" most and articulates lib-hate in the most energizing way will take over MAGA, whether it's still called MAGA or is rebranded. (The Tea Party was a rebranding for a disgraced GOP in the post-Bush era, and MAGA was essentially a personality-cult rebranding of the Tea Party.) What comes next will be extreme, but normie Republicans will dutifully go along.

Republicans don't really fight one another. They hate us too much to do that.

LIVE BY THE OOGA-BOOGA, DIE BY THE OOGA-BOOGA

This Trumper on X sees a vast Jeffrey Epstein/immigration/Mossad/COVID conspiracy:

I found this in the replies to a Laura Loomer tweet denouncing Attorney General Pam Bondi's handling of the Epstein case. This particular reply is more revealing of the MAGA mindset than all the New York Times diner safaris and Trump-voter focus groups combined.

For much of MAGA, there aren't multiple conspiracies. There's just one big conspiracy: the Deep State runs everything, and Donald Trump is tasked by God with dismantling it and bringing the malefactors to judgment.

According to this worldview, the Deep State created the COVID vaccines (and COVID) in order to kill and maim people. The vaccines are the "Covid fucking bioweapons / Still going into infants and moms."

The same Deep Staters, according to MAGA, are involved in the trafficking of children. Some in MAGA think the primary purpose of border crossing by the undocumented is "the Great Replacement" of white voters with brown voters, and white babies with brown babies -- but our tweeter seems to believe that the main purpose is child exploitation. And it's understandable that he believes this: as CBS reported last December:

President-elect Donald Trump claimed in his Person of the Year interview with Time magazine this week that President Biden's administration lost track of more than 300,000 migrant children who crossed the border unaccompanied, saying many of them are in danger or dead. But experts say he's distorting the facts.

"We have 325,000 children here during Democrats — and this was done by Democrats — who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead," Trump said. "And what I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents."

Trump repeated similar claims on the campaign trail, and Republicans, including Trump's appointed "border czar" Tom Homan, have echoed similar figures as they call for increased border security.

In fact, as the CBS story notes, the period during which ICE didn't serve notices to appear in court to 291,000 immigrant children, and 32,000 who received notices failed to appear, was from 2019 to 2023. During half of that time, Donald Trump was president. Also, no notices would have been issued to those applying for asylum or legal status. And some are probably safe but the bureaucracy lost track of them. But to our tweeter, they're all in danger, and it's all Biden's fault. (Everyone in MAGA believes that Biden was a sinister tool of the Deep State, or was controlled by tools of the Deep State -- Barack Obama working remotely? Staffers wielding the evil autopen?)

And I assume that the reference to Netanyahu stems from a belief that the Deep State is bad because the Deep State is very Jewish, and that Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump to bomb Iran on Jews' behalf, not merely Israel's. This dovetails with the widespread belief that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad. Tucker Carlson believes this, and talked at length about this belief last night:

“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. No one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty,” he said at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida.

And it's not just Carlson:

Wow. Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk just openly pondered if Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent on Turning Point of all places.

The red pill is spreading like wildfire. Incredible. pic.twitter.com/8V1R2wY7h5

— Green Lives Matter (@Ultrafrog17) July 12, 2025

The problem for Trump now is that his voters have been led to believe that the Epstein client list and the Deep State are exactly the same thing. You and I believe that Epstein procured underage girls for wealthy and influential people, some of whom we don't agree with politically, some of whom we do, and some of whom have no strong political opinions at all. MAGA believes that Epstein was a procurer only for people MAGA hates, and that the entire Deep State was in on this, because child exploitation is central to how the rich and powerful operate.

Trump and the rest of the GOP spread this idea for years, or at least encouraged its spread, by cozying up to QAnon and frequently invoking the notion of the Deep State. Millions of Trump voters fervently believe in this vast conspiracy. Not only do they believe that Trump is a superhero who can crush the conspiracy, they believe crushing this conspiracy is his life's mission. Trump and the party established unrealistic expectations for their voters -- and now they're beginning to pay the price for that.

REPUBLICAN VULNERABILITIES ARE OBVIOUS, BUT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOESN'T SEEM TO NOTICE

In April, when Kilmar Abrego Garcia became a household name after the Trump administration wrongly deported him to El Salvador, Peter Baker of The New York Times reported:

This in the view of the president’s team is a political winner with the vast majority of voters, an “80-20 issue,” as his adviser Stephen Miller puts it, referring to theoretical percentages. Mr. Trump bolsters his credentials as a scourge of evil immigrants while asserting that his critics care more about foreign-born murderers and thugs than they do about law-abiding Americans.

But Trump's approval rating on immigration has gone negative since then, and a new Gallup poll says it's reached unprecedented lows:

... [Americans'] evaluation of his work on immigration is mostly negative. Thirty-five percent approve of his handling of the issue, including 21% strongly approving, while 62% disapprove, including 45% strongly.

A 35%-62% rating is shocking on what has been Trump's best issue. And on some aspects of immigration, Republicans are on the wrong side of 80-20 issues (click the image below to enlarge it):

Support for giving Dreamers a path to citizenship was 81% last year, even though Trump was on a path to victory; now it's 85%. And nearly 80% of Americans support a path to citizenship for non-Dreamers.

Also:

When asked if immigration is generally a good thing or bad thing for the country, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults call it a good thing; a record-low 17% see it as a bad thing.

Americans are seeing what the Trump/Miller/GOP immigration policy looks like in the real world, and they're increasingly disillusioned. It's quite possible that many Americans sincerely believed GOP disinformation about immigrants, and are surprised to learn that the majority are hard workers who aren't here to deal drugs or collect welfare.

Meanwhile, the president has turned his attention back to tariffs, and here they come: there's a threatened 50% tariff on Brazil, a threatened 35% tariff on Canada, a planned 50% tariff on copper, tariffs or import taxes on Japan, South Korea, and other nations.... Markets hate Trump's tariffs. Voters hated Trump's tariffs when they seemed imminent in the spring. And while many observers think Trump will back off, Paul Krugman doesn't:

The only possible out here would be a series of fake deals, in which countries pretend to have offered significant concessions and Trump claims to have won big victories. Some people still think that will happen — the new tariffs aren’t supposed to take effect until Aug. 1. But the tone of those letters and Trump’s clear obsession with tariffs make me doubt that he’ll call the tariffs off.

... attempting to appease Trump buys you at best a few weeks’ respite before he comes back for more.

... my bet is that the TACO people — Trump always chickens out — are wrong in this case.

And while I still believe that MAGA voters will accept Trump's failure to release new information on the Jeffrey Epstein case, it's likely to alienate more recent Trump converts, including the young podcast bros who voted for him in large numbers last year.

All this is happening as government service cuts are about to worsen, and as questions continue to be asked about the feds' performance in the Texas floods. Meanwhile, at the state level, Republicans continue defying the will of the people:

When Missouri voters were asked last year whether they wanted to increase the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave, 58 percent of them said yes.

Not long after that vote, the Republicans who control the state government mobilized to unwind those changes. On Thursday, Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed into law a bill that limited the voter-approved minimum wage increase and scrapped the paid sick leave requirement altogether.

The new law in Missouri reflects the growing impatience of Republican leaders with left-leaning groups that use state ballot questions to circumvent conservative legislatures and bring policy proposals directly to voters. In Missouri, recent ballot questions have restored abortion rights, expanded Medicaid and legalized marijuana, all causes that Democrats generally support, even as Republicans have won statewide elections in landslides.

A different opposition party might observe this and confidently assert that Republicans are completely out of step with the voting public. But Democrats' message at this time continues to be: We suck. Here's a story from The Hill:

The Democratic Party’s credibility with voters has plummeted even further since the 2024 election, raising alarm bells as the party looks to rebuild ahead of the midterms and the next presidential election, according to a new poll obtained by The Hill.

The poll, which was conducted between May and June by Unite the Country, a Democratic super PAC, showed voters perceived the Democratic Party as “out of touch,” “woke” and “weak.”

The party has seen its support erode with white men, Hispanic men and working-class voters across the board, with approval ratings sitting below 35 percent across those demographics. And enthusiasm within the party continues to wane in the wake of 2024, the poll revealed.

“This is the reality of the perception of us as a party, and until we accept that, it’s going to be hard to move forward,” said Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau, who serves as senior adviser to the super PAC. “There’s a perception out there, outside of Democratic elites, and it’s taken hold in not just the MAGA crowd but people that should be with us.”

Here's one reason "enthusiasm within the party continues to wane": Democrats are more timid about rallying voters around popular positions than Republicans are about rallying voters around unpopular positions. And if you're in a state where your ideas are much more popular than Republican ideas, why not try telling voters that if they want a minimum wage increase, paid leave, and abortion rights, they should stop voting for candidates who oppose all of those things and start voting for the party that favors all those things?

Democratic candidates and Democratic groups should not be running to the press every time they find new evidence that their party is unpopular. The perception that the Democratic Party sucks is fed, in part, by Democrats who say the Democratic Party sucks.

Here's an idea: No prominent Democrat should ever tell a reporter that Democrats suck, or spoon-feed the media the results of a private poll that says Democrats suck. In fact, if Democrats are going to say that one of the major parties sucks, it should always be the Republican Party. A crazy idea, I know!

If Democrats want to say right now that Republicans are the ones who suck, they have a large quantity of real-world material to use as evidence. Try it! Working-class voters might actually like the party more if it stops punching itself in the face and begins sticking up for itself.

THIS FORMER(?) RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST IS A SMARTER DEMOCRAT THAN MOST OF THE PARTY'S ESTABLISHMENT

Dean Phillips, the former congressmnan from Minnesota who ran an unsuccessful primary campaign against President Biden in 2024, believes the Democratic Party should have a big tent, but not a tent big enough to include the choice of the party's primary voters in America's largest city:

Question: Is there room for you and Mamdani in the Democratic Party?

Phillips: The answer, ultimately, I think, is no

When you have socialists in the Democratic Party, I don't know how anybody could argue that that would be beneficial for the party or for the country pic.twitter.com/o6gWvfIUzY

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 10, 2025

This puts Phillips to the right of Joe Walsh, a radio talker and podcaster who was an extremely conservative Republican member of Congress before he became a Never Trumper. (Walsh challenged President Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries, and was about as successful as Phillips was running against Biden four years later.)

Respectfully @deanphillips.bsky.social, I disagree. As a guy who’s been a Democrat for only a month, a guy who’s a conservative Democrat, I disagree. The tent should be big enough for Mamdani and me. Right now, the tent must include all who believe in freedom, pluralism, democracy & the rule of law.

[image or embed]

— Joe Walsh (@walshfreedom.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 7:25 AM

What's striking about this is that Walsh has a history of being extraordinarily Islamophobic.

Cut thru all the politically correct crap & this is it: Islam is at war w the modern world. If they can't get along w others we'll kill em.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 14, 2015

No, Meet The Press liberals, the real reason we don't like or trust Obama is because he always, always, always, always defends Islam.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 8, 2015

Why is Obama much more squeamish 2 criticize Islam than Christianity? It's always more difficult 2 criticize your own http://t.co/LNpcPsL3ov

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 6, 2015

And there's a lesson here. People who paid attention knew that Joe Walsh said many vile things, as both a member of Congress and a broadcaster. But more moderate Republicans didn't rush to cable news in order to denounce him. They didn't make a great show of denouncing Iowa congressman Steve King when he made overtly racist remarks. They quietly tiptoed away from bigots such as Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo's Republican opponent in the 2010 New York governor's race, and North Carolina's Mark Robinson, whose offensive remarks were widely known long before the release of the porn-site message-board comments that derailed his 2024 gubernatorial campaign.

Many Republican candidates are grotesque and vile -- but it isn't considered a power move in the GOP to shout at the top of your lungs, "MY PARTY IS FULL OF EXTREMISTS AND THEY NEED TO BE PURGED ASAP!!!!" But that is seen as a power move in response to a Democrat who is merely redistributionist in economics and critical of Israeli government outrages.

Moderate Democrats don't have to like Zohran Mamdani. But if they're certain he's bad for the party, they should simply say as little as possible about him. That way, they're not denigrating the party as a whole and they have more time to criticize Republicans -- y'know, the party they run against every election cycle? But Democrats apparently don't believe that criticizing only your opponents is good politics. I still need someone to explain why that makes any sense at all.

WHY THE EPSTEIN STORY WON'T CAUSE MAGA TO BREAK WITH TRUMP

Writing for Britain's Independent, Justin Baragona notes that Jesse Watters of Fox News isn't happy with the Trump administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case:

“This just reeks,” host Jesse Watters griped on Monday night.

However, Watters didn't blame the guy at the top:

While Watters echoed the basic sentiment that has percolated across the right-wing media ecosystem, he was very careful not to directly criticize or implicate President Donald Trump as being part of an alleged cover-up. Instead, as has largely been the case among Trump fans, the Fox star’s anger was directed towards “the feds” and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Baragona adds:

Still, it remains to be seen if the conservative network’s MAGA-boosting personalities continue to hold fire against the president....

They will. They won't turn on Trump. As Baragona notes, some right-wing commentators are hesitant even to blame MAGA loyalists in the administration:

[Watters would] later turn to two guests – author Barry Levine and former CIA officer John Kiriakou – to speculate where this was part of a vast “deep state” cover-up to protect potential Epstein clients involved in the government and foreign intelligence agencies.

“We don’t know anything because the FBI does not want us to know anything,” Kirakou said at one point, though he added that he wasn’t blaming FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “I think that layer beneath them – that is part of what we like to call the deep state – has taken this bull by the horns, they have probably destroyed information.”

One of the most-liked comments in response to this Breitbart story about the case says essentially the same thing:

Whoever was actually behind Epstein -- the CIA, the FBI, the Israeli Mossad, some cabal of Deep Staters or oligarchs with outsized influence (control?) over the US government has an incredible amount of power to cover their tracks, protect their friends and keep control over the US government to deep-six any public investigation into Epstein's "clients," and more importantly Epstein's puppet-masters who doubtlessly used the blackmail material on some of America's highest-ranking politicians and businessmen.

Looks like the shadow government is real. And no one including Trump, Bongino and others like Patel who were highly praised before getting into high office are beyond its reach.

And that's largely the message of this Alex Jones monologue, although he (very reluctantly) wonders aloud whether Trump himself deserves blame:

The DOJ is running cover for the CIA and Mossad.

NO ONE IS BUYING THIS!!

Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed.” This is over the top sickening. pic.twitter.com/mudViXDfma

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) July 7, 2025

JONES: But the reason that you are seeing this deep-sixed is because the CIA with the Mossad and MI6 was running Epstein, and it was an official U.S. government operation, multinational, and it was the family business going back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad. And that's all on record. So if Trump was to actually prosecute this, it would bring down the CIA.

I'm not going to comment on the substance of these allegations. I just want to note that this won't lead most of the MAGA base to reconsider their loyalty to Trump because it fits neatly into their view of the world.

To his fans, Trump is a Schrödinger's cat: he's an all-powerful superhero, but he's also perceived as the enemy of forces that have powers greater than his. Maybe he can't defeat the Deep State! But we at least need someone as powerful and manly as Trump in the White House, because he's the only person who might fight it to a draw.

In the somewhat less conspiratorial 1980s and 2000s, the Republican base's view of the world was similar: to normal people, Ronald Reagan's right-wing counterrevolution appeared unstoppable, at least in his first term, but he and other Republicans talked as if they were the plucky underdogs fighting the power, which was liberalism and "big government." In George W. Bush's first term, he got his tax cuts, he got his wars, he had a Republican Congress and Supreme Court, but GOP propagandists conveyed the impression that the real power lay with Dan Rather on CBS News, or the Dixie Chicks sassing Trump on a concert stage, or a college professor or Hollywood star who questioned the rush to war. We saw Republicans as the people running things. Republican voters saw them as the challengers of the people who were running things.

This has been the Republican myth for two generations, and the result is that we now have people in power who believe that every institution in America -- not just government and the media and academia, but weather forecasting and cancer research -- needs to be dismantled because they're all part of the liberal Leviathan.

And we have an electorate in which millions of people believe that Republicans are never "the establishment," not even when a billionaire funded by the world's richest man and other billionaires becomes president and wields more power than any president in history, with no interference from Congress or the Supreme Court. The GOP voter base now includes more working-class people because they've been sold this myth of Trump and other Republicans as enemies of the establishment.

I'd be pleased if the Epstein story damaged Trump with his base. But this is why I don't expect that to happen.

THE WORST OF THE WORST, PAID FROM YOUR TAX DOLLARS

Garrett Graff knows what happens to law enforcement agencies that grow too fast.

I spent nearly five years reporting heavily on the decade-long epidemic of corruption that paralyzed the Border Patrol after its ill-conceived Bush-era post-9/11 hiring surge.... The Border Patrol’s hiring surge doubled the size of the force in just a few years, from about 9,200 to 18,000, a move roughly equivalent to (but still less than!) what we’re about to see happen with ICE....

As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.

All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision....

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours....

Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE — and with CBP all over again.

I think the results could be even worse than Graff imagines.

Graff is correct when he says that we should expect "a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January." But the problem isn't just a wave of applications by testosterone-poisoned men -- it's that we can expect the Trump administration to exhibit a bias toward hiring the most toxic applicants.

Remember, the president and his party find police brutality delightful and believe that attempts to hold officers accountable are a liberal plot to undermine law and order.

Since the beginning of his first term, Trump has publicly glorified police brutality, directly encouraging officers to behave more violently than they already do, and making it one of his biggest laugh and applause lines at rallies.

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice,’” the then-president told assembled law enforcement, at a speech he delivered on Long Island, New York, in 2017. “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over [their head] ... ‘Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.’ I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?’”

Trump continued: “I have to tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal. Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.”

On the campaign trail last year, he flatly said that it shouldn't be possible to charge police officers with crimes:

"We're going to give our police their power back," he told rallygoers in Waukesha, "and we are going to give them immunity from prosecution."

In other speeches, he described brutality as a solution to crime:

Former President Donald J. Trump mused on Sunday about “one really violent day” as an answer to what he has described as a plague of unchecked property crime in American cities.

“One rough hour — and I mean real rough,” Mr. Trump said. “The word will get out and it will end immediately.”

... He has in the past ... called for the summary execution of shoplifters....

In May of this year, it was reported that the Trump Justice Department would no longer hold police departments accountable for brutality in several cities:

The Trump administration has said it will roll back Biden-era police reform efforts in cities where there has been controversy over high-profile police killings and brutality.

The US justice department said on Wednesday it would dismiss oversight agreements reached with the police departments in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It will also be scrapping investigations into police constitutional violations in six other cities, including Phoenix and Memphis.

It isn't just Trump. In 2021, when police misconduct was under scrutiny in New York City, Florida governor Ron DeSantis gleefully offered incentives to NYPD officers who wanted to work in Florida. And, of course, many figures on the right -- Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene -- have demanded a pardon for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd in 2020.

I suspect that the administration will be predisposed to hire cops who claim they've been persecuted by "the woke mob." I don't think the administration will merely fail to screen them out -- I think it will be eager to have them on the team.

*****

Graff notes that the hiring spree will be primarily for balaclava-wearing goons:

... compared to the rest of the bill, there’s only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country — a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years. If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it's not makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS, and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

Your right-wing relatives will respond to this by saying, "Due process is for citizens only," even though the Constitution says nothing of the sort. If they really believe that, ask them what they think happens in this scenario: A tourist from France arrives in New York and kills someone in a hotel room in Manhattan. Do the authorities arrest the culprit and send him off to an overseas torture prison without a trial? Of course not. He gets a trial in a U.S. court conducted under U.S. law. He gets due process. Now what if he's a teenager who overstayed a tourist visa and is illegally working at a bar? Same deal -- he gets a trial. No goon squad. No torture prison. At least how we do things now. You shouldn't have to be a citizen to get due process. But more and more immigrants won't get it.

APPLICATION-GHAZI IS STEVE BANNON'S "ANCHOR LEFT, PIVOT RIGHT" ALL OVER AGAIN (updated)

Semafor reports:

The afternoon before a long holiday weekend isn’t always the best time to drop a major scoop. But the New York Times did not want to wait to publish its story about Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University in 2009, in which the paper reported that the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor then identified his race on a form as both “Asian” and “Black or African American.” Mamdani is of South Asian ethnicity and was born in Uganda.

The story, published late last week, came as the result of the release of hacked Columbia University records that were then shared with the Times. The paper believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo. Two people familiar with the reporting process told Semafor that the paper was aware that other journalists were working on the admissions story, including Rufo, a conservative best known for his crusade against critical race theory.

Mamdani, when he applied to Columbia, had lived in America for most of his life, so "American" was accurate. He was born in Africa and lived there until age 7, so "African" was accurate. And if checking those boxes seems deceitful, it didn't work -- Mamdani wasn't accepted at Columbia, even though his father was teaching there, and would go on to attend Bowdoin College.

The Times story originally said,

The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action. The Times agreed to withhold his real name.

An updated version of the story now says that Crémieux "provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race." Crémieux is actually just a graduate student, and he was identified as a white supremacist and eugenicist named Jordan Lasker in a Guardian story published in March. He appears to be an online friend of the Times story's lead author, Benjamin Ryan:

man i wonder how eugenicist and white supremacist Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux) managed to get his story into the New York Times. i'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Benjamin Ryan, who is bylined on that story, is a reader of his work? such an interesting coincidence!

[image or embed]

— alyaza ΘΔ (@alyazabirze.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 7:58 PM

And if you're wondering about his pseudonym...

The name “Crémieux” that Jordan Lasker uses is a specific, deeply anti-Muslim dog whistle: a reference to the Crémieux Decree — the official anti-Islam policy of colonial France, making Muslims in Algeria second-class citizens. Who the fuck even *knows* that, let alone makes it their _name_? Bigots.

— Anil Dash (@anildash.com) July 5, 2025 at 1:55 AM

We can theorize about why the Times is open to publishing barely relevant information derived from a data hack and traceable to a white supremacist -- but why was this being peddled to the Times in the first place? Why not just let Chris Rufo, an "independent journalist" with a wide following, publish the story himself?

The whole thing reminds me of the saga of Steve Bannon and Clinton Cash. Years ago, Bloomberg's Joshua Green wrote about how Bannon used the Times:

... he’s devised a method to influence politics that marries the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart.com ... with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, that ... partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate [its] findings to the broadest audience. The biggest product of this system is ... the bestselling investigative book, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash...

The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. [Breitbart's Wynton] Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times (“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com...

Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock’s phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative.

Rufo doesn't care that the Times published the story first. He's not competing for scoops because his main goal is to inject right-wing poison into the discourse.

Chris Rufo congratulates his "friends at the New York Times" for scooping him on the Zohran Mamdani college application thing.

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 7:37 AM

But now the poison has a New York Times pedigree, so it's deeper in the bloodstream, which is what Rufo and the other far-rightists involved in this saga want.

*****

AND: There was this in 2023, when Chris Rufo and others declared war on the president of Harvard, accusing her of plagiarism and eventually (with the help of The New York Times) driving her from office:

And here's what the squeeze looked like:

articles about Claudine Gay and her various "scandals" were top 5 featured stories on the New York Times homepage Dec 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25 and her firing is the now their top story. There is simply no way this is proportionate, sober or reasonable coverage

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) January 3, 2024

That's the formula.

I'M (MILDLY) CONCERNED ABOUT MUSK'S AMERICA PARTY

Is this a good thing for opponents of Donald Trump and the Republican Party? I'm not sure:

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and the country’s biggest political donor, said on Saturday that he would create a new political party....

“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, his social media website, on Saturday. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

It's probably not worth worrying about, because Musk doesn't seem to be doing it in a serious way:

Mr. Musk ... had not filed paperwork as of Saturday evening for the new party, though he added in a separate post that the America Party would be active in elections “next year.” No immediate signs suggested that Mr. Musk was working to establish his party quickly. Any new entity would be required to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

Mr. Musk has spoken with friends in recent days about his plan for a political party and what it would take to accomplish it, according to a person briefed on those conversations. The discussions have been more conceptual than pragmatic, the person said.

He hasn't taken any of the practical steps he'd need to take to get the project off the ground. This doesn't count:

🆕 On Twitter, @elonmusk has started following @andrewyang + https://x.com/elonmusk + https://x.com/andrewyang

[image or embed]

— Big Tech Alert (@bigtechalert.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 10:53 AM

But what if he does it? The most optimistic way of looking at the project is also the most simplistic: Musk became a Republican and a Donald Trump fan; Musk now wants to start a political party using his great wealth; therefore, Musk's candidates would split the Republican vote and help Democrats.

But we see what happens to Republicans who challenge the God Emperor: they instantly become pariahs within the GOP. It's already happening to Thomas Massie, one of the two House Republicans who voted against the Big Beautiful Bill (he also co-sponsored a bill that would have required congressional authorization for an attack on Iran):

Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky risks losing his seat in Congress amid his battles with President Donald Trump, according to a new poll.

Polling from Kaplan Strategies found that Massie was unpopular among Republican voters and would lose more support if Trump endorsed a primary opponent....

The poll of 368 likely GOP primary voters found that 19 percent said they planned to vote for Massie in the 2026 Republican primary. If Trump endorsed a primary opponent, the proportion of people voting for Massie would drop to 14 percent.

The poll also showed that 23 percent of respondents viewed the representative favorably, while 62 percent viewed him unfavorably.

Massie was primaried in 2020, 2022, and 2024, but he won all those primaries with more than 75% of the vote. He won approximately two-thirds of the vote in the 2020 and 2022 general elections, and was seen as so unbeatable in 2024 that he didn't even have a Democratic challenger. But now he's an unperson in the GOP.

The same is true of Musk, as YouGov found shortly after he and Trump started feuding:

Republicans sided with Trump by a 71%-6% margin. That 6% is lower than the percentage of independents (8%) and Democrats (11%) who side with Musk.

I'm not saying that engaged, well-informed Democrats would defect to America Party candidates. I'm saying that less-committed Democrats and moderate independents who frequently vote Democratic might be more likely to defect than Republicans. Remember, the Democratic Party needs self-identified moderates in order to win. Far more Americans identify as conservative than liberal:

An average of 37% of Americans describe their political views as “very conservative” or “conservative,” 34% as “moderate,” and 25% as “very liberal” or “liberal.”

Full story: https://t.co/WdgWywJxbR pic.twitter.com/O5nN4urmri

— Gallup (@Gallup) January 22, 2025

Yet electorally we're a 50-50 country. That means that Democrats do better with self-styled moderates than Republicans do.

Remember No Labels? Pollsters in 2023 found that a No Labels candidate took more votes away from the Democratic presidential ticket than from Trump. America Party candidates could do that, too.

On the other hand, Musk's candidates will probably be bog-standard Republicans on most issues. They'll be hardcore on budget deficits, and almost certainly opposed to higher taxes on rich people. Maybe they'll accept the existence of alternative energy. Candidates with that profile might cut into the GOP vote.

But it could be pointless to take this seriously. Even if the highly distractible Musk follows through, he'll have a hard time finding appealing candidates who are willing to burn their bridges to the GOP in what they assume will be a losing battle. So this will probably fizzle out like No Labels.

Musk is starting us off with low expectations:

One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.

Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2025

Would Musk pick races Democrats could win, and then serve as a spoiler? That's possible. Would Musk try to unseat far-right Freedom Caucus members who yielded to pressure from Trump, even though they're mostly in deep-red districts and are thus unlikely to lose? Also possible.

Will Musk realize that he can't effortlessly gain leverage over the entire Congress and bail on the entire project? That's quite possible. I think the most likely outcome is that he'll abandon the project. He might well engineer a rapprochement with Trump and the GOP by 2026. But if he does what he's promising to do now -- a big if -- there's a chance it could help the Republican Party.