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.