The bitterness of the very online right is unlikely to register with the vast majority of GOP voters.
I t was only a few weeks ago that the MAGA coalition shattered into smithereens because of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. You remember that, right? Shortly after the president joined Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iranian military targets, the load-bearing pillars of Trump’s electoral base crumbled — perhaps irreparably — internecine political combat spilled into the public square, and Trump’s hold over the GOP began to slip.
Doesn’t ring a bell? Well, it shouldn’t. In the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer, the notion that Trump’s support within the Republican Party is contingent on the support of a loud but narrow sliver of the GOP’s coalition — one that is overrepresented in online forums — was wished into existence. The whole thing was a mirage. Today, only about one in ten Republicans tells pollsters that he disapproves of the job Trump is doing in office.
The effort to manufacture a MAGA schism was a project not just of Trump’s enemies in the press. It was the impression that was implicitly conveyed by MAGA movement figures in good standing, including the vice president. He went to bat for Trump’s strikes, but he spoke mostly to that very MAGA contingent, and he did so in a form that was redolent of a public relations firm engaging in frenetic crisis communications.
In fairness to the president’s enemies, it’s hard not to notice that those who aspire to lead the MAGA coalition adopt a defensive posture whenever the denizens of the internet express the mildest hint of discomfort with the president’s initiatives. A similar dynamic is emerging among the very online right, and the journalists who obsessively follow the very online right, amid the implosion of the capital-“C” version of the alleged conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein.
As Jim Geraghty explained, with as much patience as anyone could be expected to muster, it was always foolish to believe that there was some master ledger out there implicating the world’s richest and most powerful people in a child-trafficking and abuse ring. That was, however, what the most credulous people in the country believed — and they believed it because too many influential figures within Trump’s inner circle lent credence to it.
Commensurate with their insularity, these MAGA influencers now maintain that their ire is reflective of the simmering fury slowly consuming the president’s political movement. The press, desperate as it is for evidence that Trump’s hold over the GOP is conditional, is amplifying this unrepresentative faction’s grievances.
Axios reports this morning that the Trump administration is “bleeding trust” among the MAGA faithful. That would be an understandable response from the movement’s influencer set. After all, they had only recently been used as a political prop for the purposes of popularizing a lie. Even worse, says Axios, Trump’s outburst at a reporter who asked about the nonexistence of the so-called client list, calling the issue a “desecration” and a “waste” of time, “is fueling a deeper sense of betrayal.”
“Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon — influential Trump allies who have feuded with the president at times — are among those who have accused the administration of a cover-up,” Axios continues. At this point, the report executes a Crazy Ivan and pivots wildly to the Trump administration’s close coordination with the Israeli government, which has also irritated the MAGA influencer set. “MAGA’s deep divisions over Israel have only exacerbated the Epstein backlash, as some influencers revive unproven claims that he was involved with Israeli intelligence,” the dispatch adds.
Republican voters are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel over Iran and its terrorist proxies, and the GOP’s backing for Trump’s kinetic support of the mission inside Iran jumped by ten points (from 72 to 82 percent) in the wake of those strikes. We can deduce, therefore, that this very online right’s skepticism of Israel’s intelligence agencies isn’t necessarily shared by the broader universe of Republican voters for whom MAGA’s influencers presume to speak.
The movement’s conspiracists can take some solace in the polling around Epstein’s case. A majority of Republican respondents to a recent YouGov survey said they were “not very” or “not at all confident” that “all people connected with Jeffrey Epstein who are alleged to have committed sex crimes will be thoroughly investigated.” As to whether Donald Trump was one of those people, however, just 7 percent of Republicans say “yes.” That would suggest that the version of the conspiracy around the nonexistence of the list — that the president and his subordinates are deliberately suppressing it — will find few takers on the mainstream right.
Sure, the influencers are fit to be tied. Liz Wheeler warns that Trump has lost his base, which “could cost him the midterms.” The Justice Department’s failure to make “any major Democratic arrests” has given way to insurrectionary rage, declares the self-described “unelected representative of the American people” Ann Vandersteel. “This is unsustainable and stomps a muddy boot on our Constitution and the rule of law,” the inexplicably influential figure behind the X account DC_Draino declared. The episode amounts to “a shameful chapter in our country’s history.”
Just as the press searches in vain for evidence that Trump’s support among Republicans is somehow contingent, this portion of the MAGA movement appears to have internalized an inflated impression of their contribution to the president’s popularity. They appear to believe that his power is derivative of theirs, not the other way around. The jilted influencer set has earned their sense of betrayal — they were callously used. But they were used willingly and in contravention of anything resembling good sense. Moreover, they are mistaken if they believe that getting to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case is a priority for the average Republican voter. Their deserved bitterness is unlikely to register with the vast majority of GOP voters — who maintain a healthy distance from the madness that populates the internet — much less spark a Republican civil war.