'Not out of the woods': Conservative warns Trump may have to 'throw MAGA a bone'
President Donald Trump seems to have tamped down a MAGA rebellion for now — but he might be forced to offer some concessions to his most rabid followers, an analyst said Tuesday.
The president's followers revolted after his Department of Justice stated that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had not kept a "client list" for his sex trafficking network, but Trump issued a social media demand that his supporters stop questioning those findings – and MAGA influencers and conservative broadcasters are apparently beginning to fall into line.
"This is actually the first time that I've seen this sort of civil war actually erupting to this degree," conservative columnist Matt Lewis told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I think this is telling what is the defining issue, what is the issue that the MAGA base is passionate enough to go to a civil war over? It's not Stormy Daniels, it's not storming the Capitol, you know, it is this Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory. I think that tells us a lot, and look, have some people capitulated? Clearly, yes, but I don't think that Trump is out of the woods yet."
"There are Charlie Kirks and Laura Ingrahams who are now selling out and saying nothing to see here," Lewis added. "But there are others who I think are actually true believers, whether that's because they're just crazier and more into conspiracy theories, or because they're actually sincerely concerned about the fact that, look, Jeffrey Epstein was a sex trafficker, and it just seems logical that more people other than Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell, his accomplice, were involved in this. So I'm not sure this is that he's out of the woods yet."
Host Joe Scarborough had joked earlier that Trump had sprinkled "magic pixie dust" on his followers to get them to stop talking about the Epstein matter, and Axios co-founder Mike Allen agreed that it seems to have been the case.
"The pixie dust, as Joe put it, worked for now, and my conversations with Trump world yesterday, the headline was 'Trump is pissed,'" Allen said. "Like, those three words, in addition to what he was saying in front of cameras, behind the cameras, he was sending the same message, and so that's why you saw [Turning Point USA leader] Charlie Kirk backing off. But pull back the camera, look at why this erupted and why ... this may not be over. If you look at how MAGA came to power, there's a story up, the lead story of Axios right now, about MAGA paranoia, the MAGA siege mentality."
"MAGA came to power based on suspicion, right, of elites, of globalists, of the deep state, and so that is wired into the MAGA DNA," Allen added. "So they're always going to listen to Trump, and Trump can tamp it down, but that's the reason that this erupted so ferociously, why they rebelled against Trump, and why ... there may be efforts to throw them a bone. Axios [correspondent] Marc Caputo has some great reporting about off-ramps, if Trump decides to take them. They could appoint a special counsel or some sort of investigative committee. They could ask courts to unseal documents that have been sealed, but I'm told from inside the White House that's complicated because minors are involved, and they could also redact some of the redacted documents that they put out."
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