Trumpists against Trump

Donald Trump has alienated a good number of his MAGA supporters by seeking to suppress the full disclosure of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Are his supporters angry because they think he is guilty of having sex with underaged girls, or because he is using his office to control information and limit what the public can know?

Many of the most fervent Trump supporters subscribe to conspiracy theories, believing that a ‘deep state’ runs their lives and that Democrats either built that state or protected its clandestine operations. For Trump to conceal the disclosure of a file that might contain details about powerful people implicated in a sex trafficking network is to act like one of those politicians who profit from lying and keep ordinary people in the dark. Alex Jones, the far-right radio host, told Trump: ‘You’re not the pope, bro!’ Steve Bannon predicts that 10 per cent of Trump’s loyalists will turn away (they will still be Trumpists, but against Trump).

It would be a better world if the Trump supporters currently angry with him were outraged about child sex trafficking, grooming and the coercion of young women (more than a thousand women and girls, according to the Department of Justice) by the Epstein network, but their focus seems to be elsewhere. The reprehensible treatment of these women is not at the centre of the right-wing outrage, though the feminist left is foregrounding their voices.

Trump insists that the whole Epstein affair is a ‘hoax’ and that his own followers are ‘stupid’ and ‘weaklings’. Their reaction has been intense and swift, since Trump now sounds like the elitists who disparage them – elitists like Hillary Clinton, who called them ‘a basket of deplorables’. Trump scoffs at their complaints, noting that his supporters have nowhere else to go. They feel not only deceived by their hero but demeaned, insulted and outraged, the way they felt when Democrats were in power.

Those in the MAGA movement are used to seeing Trump lie in public. They were thrilled by his willingness to stand up against the elitists. He used obscenities, said whatever he wanted, showed disdain for standards of truth and evidence-based arguments, displayed his willingness to strip people of rights, to reverse the legal accomplishments of the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, to mock the history of racism and ban books from schools, in the face of liberal and left outrage.

They loved to see the left shocked by every authoritarian move, every act that erodes constitutional democracy and human rights frameworks (including abduction, detention and deportation). Every display of moral outrage on the left was a source of intense enjoyment to the MAGA movement. Elitist moralists were made to suffer as MAGA enthusiasts felt a sense of empowerment, a resurgence of white masculinist authority, a thrill at identifying with someone amassing more power than they will ever have, a chance to forget the increasing precarity of their everyday lives and to stay aloft in the zone of excited ressentiment.

But now Trump has returned them to a sense not only of their powerlessness but of their dispensability, and their rage is escalating. They never imagined that they would be in the position of those they enjoyed ridiculing so much. They never imagined that their hero would be laughing at them, mocking and discarding them, going back on his word, lying to their faces. They find themselves in the position of those they disdain, returned to an intolerable sense of powerlessness, duped by the man who was supposed to convert their sense of marginalisation into a shameless display of cruelty and destruction.

Trump has always made clear that he seeks profit and power for himself alone. There is no loyalty that can’t be forfeited when there is a better deal. The shameless cruelty that his supporters applauded is now, without compunction, directed against them. Trump tells them they have been duped by the Epstein conspiracy, but some now know that they have been duped and dismissed by him: they can see that is cloaking a confession in an allegation.

Having enjoying the spectacle of Trump’s shameless cruelty, they now find themselves on the receiving end of it. Their moral outrage comes from the shock of that reversal and feelings of betrayal. But will any of them question the Trumpian logic of gaining autocratic power through the unchecked and explicit destruction of constitutional democracy, and see the need for a strong democratic social movement to oppose it? Will the voices of the survivors of the Epstein sex trafficking network finally be heard and championed by those now estranged from Trump? I sadly doubt it. What seems most likely is that the MAGA movement will continue to embrace Trumpism without Trump, with its promise of a spectacle of cruelty for them to enjoy and no longer, or never again, suffer its intolerable effects.