For nearly a decade, President Donald Trump has had what many experts describe as an “iron-clad grip” on his party. However, July appears to mark what conservative columnist Matt Lewis described as the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
“It took six months into President Trump’s second term to get here, but something shifted in Trump World this month,” Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published Friday in The Hill.
“The administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case – including its assertion that a ‘client list’ doesn’t exist – sent tremors through the MAGA ecosystem, creating a permission structure for key players on the right to start treating Trump like a lame duck.”
The Trump administration’s handling of the case on Epstein – the convicted sex offender who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges – has indeed been an anomaly for Trump, who ordinarily comes out of any scandal unscathed by his most loyal supporters, and in many cases, even more popular, such as after his dozens of criminal indictments last year.
On Epstein, however, Trump’s hesitancy to release documents related to the disgraced financier, along with his attacks on those who demand transparency, have sent a shockwave through MAGA world that Lewis said appeared to mark a turning point in the president’s control of the GOP.
“Taken together – the reality of Trump’s lame-duck status, being out of touch with much of his base and now the physical deterioration – we are left with a picture of a man whose once iron-clad grip on his party is finally beginning to loosen,” Lewis wrote.
“The base might not say it outright. MAGA influencers certainly won’t admit it – but they absolutely see it. And more importantly, they’re starting to act on it. The jostling has begun.”
Trump’s path to irrelevancy, Lewis argued, will also likely ignite a crisis in the Republican Party, a party Lewis said had been “hollowed out” by Trump and had its institutions "scorched."
“This is the tragedy and farce of the post-Trump GOP: it bet everything on a single man, and now it has no idea how to function without him,” Lewis wrote.