President Trump once famously quipped that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and his strongest supporters would stay with him. For nearly a decade this has seemed true, but today, the president may have stumbled on the exception, in the sickening form of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
It turns out that Epstein is a major test for Trump in the eyes of his MAGA warriors. They want real answers from this administration, not fumbled document dumps and dismissive comments from the president himself, as we saw this week.
10 REASONS THE DOJ AND FBI FACE BACKLASH OVER EPSTEIN FILES FLOP
Now, we have FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino who is apparently threatening to resign over the debacle, if Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t go first and a bewildered MAGA base that feels it is being insulted and lied to by its government, again.
To be sure, Epstein was an awful human being who preyed on poor underage girls for decades, according to testimony from the Ghislane Maxwell trial (which I covered in the courthouse), as well as a wealth of other evidence. But for most Americans, his crimes and suspicious death are a mere curiosity at this point.
It is much, much more for hard-core MAGA. For them, it is nothing less than a test to determine whether or not the Swamp that has lied to our faces for decades is still in control.
This week, Steve Bannon said the only way the Epstein story goes away is if