'The jig is up:' Conservative says Trump faces a 'dormant virus that could flare up again'

The marriage between Donald Trump and a wide array of his MAGA supporters is coming apart at the seams as they finally begin to see that he is not the "drain the swamp" reformer he has led them to believe he was.

That is the opinion of longtime conservative columnist Matt Lewis in a column for the Los Angeles Times, where he claims: "The spell is broken. The jig is up."

At issue, he notes. is Trump trying to blow off the Jeffrey Epstein files as unimportant despite harping on the "deep state" for years.

According Lewis, Trump spent years playing a large part creating a culture of conspiracy as a central tenet among his most avid followers and now, with the slow-walking of the Epstein files, he "got out-conspiracy-theoried" and is finding himself in the crosshairs.

Chief among his problems is that he was responsible for elevating a collection of "alt-right B-listers" like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and rabble-rouser Nick Fuentes, who have peeled off their factions.

With Epstein front and central, they "have caught the scent of blood in the water," Lewis suggested.

"The incentives have changed for MAGA influencers. Trump finally feels like a lame duck, and the knives are out, not just to inherit the throne, but for the whole spoils system of the MAGA grift," he wrote before posing the question: "How does it end?"

"Eventually, this story will be suppressed or at least professionally ignored. But it won’t be fully memory-holed," he predicted before adding more battles are sure to come by writing, "So Trump survives — but he carries with him a dormant virus that could flare up again."

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