The Trump administration’s multiple climbdowns on its promise to release the Epstein files are continuing to cause issues for Trump himself amongst his MAGA support base. Like many in the top echelons of the US capitalist establishment, he enjoyed a close relationship with Epstein. In a disgraceful interview from 2004, he told New York Magazine:
“I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy… He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Trump’s demagogy
Trump demagogically campaigned to release the files in the 2024 Presidential campaign. Since then, his Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that the files were on her desk waiting to be released. She engaged in the theatre of giving some heavily redacted information, much of which was already public knowledge, to pet influencers, before rowing back on the issue. Trump reverted to claiming that it was a hoax to discredit him. He sent officials to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, in an attempt to minimise his connection to the issue, after which she was moved to a minimum security prison, with the idea of a pardon for her being floated.
Once congressional arithmetic made it impossible to avoid their release, Trump was forced to support this – with Congress voting almost unanimously in favour of it. An FBI review of the files is underway before deciding what more to release.
The Epstein scandal has caused a greater problem with his base than other issues, as it catches the imagination of the MAGA movement. Part of the fallout is understood to be related to the Republican Party’s future. After the George W. Bush administration and the election of Obama in 2008, there was a period of intense internal turmoil surrounding the Tea Party movement. This era saw numerous incumbents defeated in primaries, and an increasingly reactionary and uncompromising mood was created as the backdrop for Trump’s rise to power.
The Trumpian GOP
Throughout the period since winning the 2016 Presidential election, the primary means of discipline has been Trump banging the table. Those who publicly broke with him were generally forced out of the party. Otherwise, any differences or fractures have been covered over by this personalism. However, barring a power grab, Donald Trump is term-limited from future presidential runs.
The fallout of Majorie Taylor-Greene, the high-profile MAGA congresswoman who has broken with Trump over the Epstein files, as well as his support for Israel and the recent government shutdown, is a variation of this. She is resigning her seat in Congress, in a sign both of Trump’s continued strength as a threat and, seemingly, of a longer-term strategy to position herself as an internal dissident to Trump ahead of trends she anticipates.
During the first term, the section of the Republican establishment that worried about this fundamentally unstable figure having unfettered power was able to prevent him from enacting too much that would have veered from their orthodoxy. However, this has been less the case in his second administration, as he has stuffed it with people who will agree with his far-right policies and programme.
Divisions over Israel
Others are happy to be allowed spheres of influence. For example, Marco Rubio has a large say over his passion project for an aggressive policy in Latin America, whilst having much less influence over other parts of foreign policy than would largely be the case for the Secretary of State.
Some of Trump’s billionaire backers are exploiting the opportunities provided by that closeness to him to enrich themselves, and the administration’s attacks on what regulatory mechanisms are in operation within US capitalism. This is particularly true of the major tech giants who have all enthusiastically backed Trump.
The role of and support for Israel have featured. Whilst fundamentally the Zionist State plays a role as a regional enforcer for US imperialism in the Middle East, the genocide it has undertaken with the full support of both the Biden and Trump administrations has had effects within the US right and far-right. Their more isolationist views make them less enthusiastic about wasting resources on wars abroad, when those resources could better be used at home, including on domestic wars against political opposents, immigrants, and other minorities.
They also realise that the authority of the world’s largest capitalist power has been undermined by arming and backing the genocidal massacre of Palestinians, given the strength of the Palestine solidarity movement globally.
In a movement as malformed as MAGA, though, some of this discourse reflects questions over who to be racist towards, Jews or Palestinians, and/or Muslims. This movement has a long history of Islamophobia, and racism towards black and brown people; on top of this it regularly spouts anti-Semitic thropes in its warped conspiracy theories.
Fascist Fuentes
Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News host who runs the most popular American right-wing podcast, recently broke a kind of cordon sanitaire around “Groyper” Nick Fuentes – an extremely far-right racist. This has caused significant consternation within official organs of the right-wing establishment, such as their leading think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which has links to Carlson. Fuentes, who first came to public attention in the aftermath of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally in 2017, has gradually built up a large online following over the years, trading in racism, Holocaust denial, and misogyny, with a style that displays contempt for the official representatives of the right and often his own audience, whom he constantly insults.
From the internal logic of the American Right, which has rubbished any pleading of minority groups, attacking the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ people and painting any attempts to curb such attacks on minorities as wokeness, that there is a reaction against carving out an exception for supporters of Israel under the remit of combating antisemitism is perhaps unsurprising. Groyperism, therefore, can be seen as a particularly misanthropic product of the US right.
The threat of the far right
As an example of this, Carlson responded by pointing out that figures like Congressman Randy Fine are worse than Fuentes, whilst being welcomed in respectable circles in the right. Fines is a far-right Republican who openly celebrates the deaths of Palestinians and has called for nuclear annihilation of the people of Gaza.
These various contradictions are likely to deepen if the administration becomes even more unpopular, as is being seen in polling, the GOP’s poor performance in recent state and local elections, and a post-Trump future on the horizon.
MAGA and the rise of the far right globally are reflective of the deep malaise within capitalism in our era. Within this movement, there is a growing contradiction between its broad populist base and billionaire leaders like Trump. The cost of living is rising, he has not ended the “forever wars”, and not ended the political corruption people see the Epstein scandals as symbolic of. These were all issues that propelled him to power.
Of course, the far-right in general is still gaining traction, with its racist and queerphobic message; the threat it poses is still very real and dangerous. The election of Zohran Mamdani in New York shows the potential to build a credible left-wing alternative, a potential that will only be reached if it is willing to break with the logic of capitalism and the two parties in the US that uphold its rule.