Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes singled out MAGA activist Charlie Kirk for brutal criticism for capitulating to President Donald Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Kirk declared Monday that he was “done talking about Epstein” after receiving a phone call from the president, just days after publicly questioning Department of Justice findings about the disgraced financier and his alleged crimes, and Sykes blistered the Turning Point USA founder and other MAGA luminaries for falling in line.
"Let's start with with Charlie Kirk," Sykes said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I mean, Jesus, you know, what a pathetic toady. You know, being able to, you know, flip-flopping that quickly."
"I mean, you have the MAGA influencers, you know, the folks like Laura Ingraham and Charlie Kirk, and then you have the actual base, and they're they're trying to exercise this, this amazing Jedi mind trick, like, 'No, we didn't say anything that we said, you don't believe anything, you believe all of those conspiracy theories that we have been force feeding you were completely false.'"
The episode will be a test of these influencers' sway over Trump's base, Sykes said.
"Now, how will that play among the 7,000 people who raised their hands at the TP USA conference?" Sykes said, referring to an overwhelming response when attendees of the conservative conference were asked if they believe there was an Epstein client list that incriminated associates of the billionaire pedophile.
"But then I also think it's important to make the distinction between the hardcore MAGA base, which will, you know, probably fall in line because they always do, and the, you know, the MAGA-adjacent, the Trump-curious folks, you know, the Joe Rogans, the other podcasters out there in the 'manosphere' who clearly are having this moment like, 'Wow, if only we had been warned that this guy was a complete con man, that a lot of the things that we thought about Donald Trump turned out not to be true.'"
"I think that that has that will have some resonance here, because right now, I mean, look, Trump and MAGA have had tremendous success in getting the base to believe anything that they say, you know, black is white, white is black, Jan. 6 was a patriotic event, but they're in the process now of really aggressively telling the base and the rest of the country, you know, that ocean is not wet there's no water in that ocean and so, you know, how effective will that be?"
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