It wasn't Epstein who made Trump appear old, unwell, and on the verge of losing his party

On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House for a month to avoid a vote on the release of the Epstein files. Johnson said that the Republicans weren’t going to be part of the “Democrats’ sideshows.”

However, this omits the fact that a small but growing number of Republicans have been in the vanguard of the push to release everything the administration knows about the child-sex trafficker. The vote that Johnson canceled Tuesday was on a bipartisan measure.

“Americans were promised justice,” said rightwing Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky in a social media post, according to reporting by the HuffPost’s Jen Bendery. “Our binding bipartisan legislation to release the complete Epstein files now has 20 sponsors.”

The speaker’s bid to blame the Democrats for the president’s Epstein troubles came the same day Donald Trump himself tried, though instead of blaming them for making a stink about the scandal, he blamed them for attempting to invalidate his 2016 victory, which was a bid, in and of itself, to draw attention from his Epstein troubles.

“[Barack] Obama cheated on the election,” Trump said in reference to the 2016 election. “And you should mention that every time [reporters] give you a question that’s not appropriate [that is, about the Epstein scandal]. Just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

We should not doubt that the MAGA faithful are willing to blame the former president for the intelligence report that concluded that the Russians influenced the 2016 election without changing any votes. But we should consider doubting whether the MAGA faithful are willing to continue giving Trump a never-ending supply of benefit-of-the-doubt.

To them, he was supposed to smash the deep state after winning back the White House. He was supposed to expose the (Jewish) conspiracy, represented by Jeffrey Epstein, in which elites got away with heinous crimes against innocent children by securing the favor of other elites.

He was supposed to be their savior, but then the attorney general said two weeks ago there was no client list — cased closed. In the eyes of MAGA, Trump became not so much against the deep state but of it.

Sure, Trump has ordered Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony in Epstein’s case, but to MAGA, that’s just “dangling bits of red meat,” said Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. (A federal judge in Florida rejected Bondi’s request.)

MAGA is an insatiable ideology. Halvsies are never enough. And that’s why we should consider altering how we are seeing the Epstein story, from one about a president who is losing his touch with supporters to one about ambitious and cynical individuals who are willing to savage their own party for political gain, making bigger and more extreme promises to a radical base, setting themselves up for future failure.

Perhaps the real story is how Trump purified the GOP of “Republicans in name only” but now that he has, as president again, reneged on a campaign promise to bring a perceived cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles to justice, he’s getting a dose of his very own medicine.

Moreover, he’s old, in poor health. With the tax bill signed into law, the GOP may not have more use for him. With new reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the exposure to his right flank has just gotten worse.

According to the Journal, Bondi told Trump in May that his name was in the Epstein files, along with hundreds of others. From the reporting, it’s clear that Trump was OK with Bondi closing the case in light of the fact that his name was among the files. It’s also clear that a “client list” does indeed exist. It’s moreover clear, given that Trump said Bondi hadn’t told him his name was in the files, that he’s in on the coverup.

Put all this together and you can see that “we’re settling into the Kremlinology phase of Trumpism,” according to Steve Millies, a political scientist and professor of theology at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union. “It's smart to watch the apparatchiks jockey.”

“That's the game to watch.”

Below is my second interview with Professor Millies.

JS: In our last chat, you suggested divisions between Republicans over Trump’s bombing of Iran were in fact a preview of what's to come over the future leadership of the party. The last few days suggest a similar dynamic with respect to the ongoing Epstein scandal.

SM: I think basically, yes, we are watching the cult of personality that has sustained Trump for 10 years now begin to fracture and crack up. The fractures of the Iran bombing now have widened somewhat with the Epstein controversy. This is actually a very conventional development.

Ronald Reagan had assembled the GOP into an unwieldy coalition in 1980 that was held together largely by his personality — by him.

When he left the stage, Republicans devoured George HW Bush for not being Reagan, but the reality was that the coalition of libertarians, evangelicals, free marketers, defense hawks, etc, was always unnatural.

Here, with a putatively lame-duck president who is nearly 80, the coalition is fracturing in much the same way. The man at the center is vanishing before our eyes. Smart Republicans know the “who’s next?” question needs to be answered, and some of them want it to be them.

Some Republicans seem interested, though not eager, to throw Trump away now that they've gotten what they want in the GOP tax bill. Johnson broke with him (rhetorically). Mick Mulvaney suggested Trump is in the files, encouraging the idea of a cover-up. The incentives are pointing in the direction of more division, not less.

It's interesting to try to spool out what that endgame looks like, too. In every way, the GOP is the dog that caught the car now. There's not much more to strive for from the perspective of policy. But, of course, the MAGA movement has always been about power and dominance.

The tricky question is how do you hold power when you've already delivered everything you can imagine. That was also sort of the problem at the end of the Reagan years. It did in Thatcher, etc. And with, for example, [white supremacist podcaster and former Trump supporter] Nick Fuentes, I think we see something like the answer. In that Twitter video, Fuentes is doing a version of what Rush Limbaugh was doing in the early 1990s when he invented the idea of a RINO.

The Republicans have been consuming each other that way for a long time, turning on their own in a farther race to the fringe, because it becomes the only place to go when you're all out of policy to deliver.

The debate needs to move to the extreme, because the field of battle has been won. We saw that in the 1990s in the way the Democrats went for Bill Clinton's Third Way, Labour went for Tony Blair's neoliberalism. The thing to do is to call Trump a RINO and shift right. Will the Democrats fall for it again? That's a question I'm asking.

Well, will they? Right now, the Democrats seem to be doing a pretty good job of wedging the Republicans, forcing them to take untenable positions, either on the side of exploiting a conspiracy theory for political gain or of covering it up. Fuentes is adding to that by accusing Trump of fomenting history's greatest scam. Thoughts?

I wonder whether wedging the Republicans is possible anymore. There are some ambient, environmental factors that I think need more consideration. It's not just the two old parties jousting in the conventional way. We've seen a 25- to 30-point swing in national opinion about immigration since January. Does it matter?

I wonder a lot whether our political lives have been siloed and segmented in such a way that creates a lot of space for cognitive dissonance. Even Republican opinion has moved on immigration, but does that move the needle at all in terms of national public policy?

Think of it in the same way that some people can say all sorts of racist things but treat people they actually encounter with warmth and kindness: their abstract racism is something they're very attached to, and that has real-world consequences for people, but also they can't imagine themselves being mean to anybody.

I wonder if we haven't moved into a space like that on a much larger scale, in part because the market and the technology have siloed and segmented us to the point that our own identities (personal brands) are so attached to those abstractions that we won't abandon them, even when we'll say the opposite if we're asked the question in a poll.

It's in that way that people like Nick Fuentes worry me. If one or a few Republican figures can claim all or part of the MAGA movement, there's not much here that’s saying that the MAGA agenda can't just go on.

I'm not sure how you wedge the GOP when their voters have learned the habit of this binary division so well that they've invested their identities in it, and they'll “own the libs” all over again without looking too closely at the issues at all, because the libs are just wrong.

And Trump was wrong for them too, maybe, but the cultural anger runs too deep to abandon the whole thing. If that's all right, then Democrats need something more than a conventional wedge strategy.

I'm not sure what it would be that they need.

But 1990s triangulation politics isn't going to be it.

In a previous chat, you mentioned that "we're settling into the Kremlinology phase of Trumpism." Do all authoritarian movements devolve? What can small-d democrats do to hasten it?

I'm cautious against "all movement" statements for a few reasons and, indeed, the Kremlinology reference is related to a time when [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev was dying and the USSR, while it didn't have long left, was showing no outward signs of going away.

On the other hand, all things dissolve and nothing ever is permanent — not constitutional government, not authoritarianism.

History is helpful, because we can learn to understand patterns and relationships to make useful predictions, but there are no iron laws of history. This time is always different from last time. In our time, I genuinely do worry about the tech and the marketplace, how their combination has introduced a new variable to the equation.

We, the people who participate in politics, have been changed by those market and technological interactions — all of us. We are only beginning to understand the political significance of those changes but I think we know they've happened. I'm writing a book about this now.

Our relationship to information has changed, our understanding of what politics is has changed. It's subtle and not easy to see clearly or understand, but I think it's happened and it's important.

It’s the reason I gestured before to ambient and environmental factors — things around politics that interact with politics are different. And because I'm only beginning to understand it as much as anybody, the best I can say for small-d democrats is that it's urgently important not to play from the old playbook (as we discussed about Hakeem Jeffries last time).

Getting past authoritarians is going to require more than defeating Republicans at the ballot box. We're going to have to confront how the ways that we live, how we've been changed, have contributed to this. We need to think about the ways to change how we live that can make an effective difference and lead to strategies suited for this time.

This isn't going to be a simple problem to escape, because the marketplace and the technology wrap around us. They envelop us. They determine how all of us live. The marketplace and the technology aid authoritarianism and authoritarianism aids them. That's the dynamic we need to attack, all of us in the forums of our own lives.