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Welcome back to False Flag! The Jeffrey Epstein case keeps getting worse for the Trump administration. Skater-podcaster Tim Pool, a kind of tribune of the non-traditional Republican bro, said Tuesday night it’s the biggest opportunity Democrats have had in a decade.
Pool might be overstating it a bit, but there’s no question that Trump has found himself unable, so far, to get out of this one. And while much of it is his own fault, some of it can be chalked up to an increasingly Balkanized media landscape, where outlets have varying interests and audiences to which they must attend. Read on for how the right-wing media is refusing to let their hero escape.
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–Will
Trump’s Right-Wing Media Machine Turns on Him
Here’s why the Jeffrey Epstein story has fractured MAGA.
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FOR A SECOND THERE, Donald Trump looked like he might just succeed at reining in his right-wing media allies over the end of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. After throwing a fit over the press’s coverage of the botched rollout of a Justice Department memo about Epstein, and demanding that everyone simply move on, the president called Charlie Kirk to talk about the matter.
Kirk had just presided over a MAGA conference that devolved into Epstein factionalism, and had been publicly bemoaning the president’s handling of the Epstein saga, going so far as to warn Trump that he was greatly misreading the moment. But after the call, he said he was done talking about Epstein and would continue to put his faith in Trump.
“I’m going to trust my friends in the administration,” Kirk said. “I’m going to trust my friends in the government.”
The next day, the moratorium was already off, and Kirk was talking about Epstein again. By Wednesday afternoon—after Trump had once more denounced Republicans who wanted more information about the Epstein case, this time calling them “stupid” “weaklings” and disowning their support for his administration—Kirk was talking about Epstein and Trump even more.
Trump, he insisted, was in “an active posture” because he saw so many “threats on the horizon,” and was so riled up with his legitimate fears about the deep state.
“He thinks that some people are trying to use this to hurt him,” Kirk said. “We’re trying to use this to save him.”
Kirk may have been trying to place Trump in the best light possible. But his inability or unwillingness to simply drop the story made clear that Trump’s attempt to bully his followers into forgetting about Jeffrey Epstein had failed. It also created the most unfathomable of spectacles: The best media manipulator in all of politics fundamentally misreading the media landscape before him.
For this newsletter, I dove deep into the world of MAGA influencers covering the Epstein saga to better understand how big of a misreading Trump has made, how fractured the community has become, and how significant the damage might be.
If Trump had to rein in only some of the more establishment conservative media outlets covering the Epstein story, he may have been able to do so. Fox News, for example, dropped nearly all discussion of Epstein on Monday, mentioning the deceased sex-criminal’s name only eight times the entire day, according to a Media Matters analysis.
But it’s 2025, and cable isn’t king. Trump has to manage an unwieldy collection of small right-wing websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and solo social-media operatives. In the grand tradition of the backbiting MAGA media, every one of those outlets is ...
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