Trump together with Epstein: NAJ screen shot

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The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This is almost too good to be true. Donald Trump ordered the death of Jeffrey Epstein in prison to cover up his own crimes of pedophilia from his loyal followers who propelled him into power. There, it’s been said and reported, files or no released files.

Imagine the heartbreak when you discover that your promised savior is the lead dog pedophile in a circle of jerks, and his best friend was the pimp?

The QAnon conspiracy theory that helped lead followers to Trump claimed that a ring of pedophiles controlled the government. Turns out Trump was not just in on it. He ordered Epstein killed in prison to conceal the facts, to prevent him from turning state’s evidence and testifying or any documents from coming to light, including a fantasized client list.

The prophesy they believed in was that Trump himself would someday be the one to expose those involved in this ultimate conspiracy. Supporters have said over and over that they genuinely believed Trump had been saved by God to fulfill this prophecy. I’m not making this up. Even the New York Times reported it.

After the attempts on his life last year, Trump promoted the idea that he was such a threat to the “deep state” and the establishment that they wanted him dead. His return to the site of an assassination attempt during the campaign last year took on overtones of a mass religious event, when the crowd broke out into a sustained chant of “where we go one, we go all” – the motto and chant of Qanon.

Q Takes the Capitol, a New American Journal graphic by artist Walter Simon, depicts this golden calf of the Shaman of Qanon in his bison horn headdress, flying a flag with the slogan, “Quo unus nostrum it, eo universi imus.” The saying is inspired by the coming of age at sea saga “White Squall” using a lame slogan from the Albatross ship’s bell, “Where we go one, we go all.”

You literally can’t make this stuff up. Truth is truly stranger than any fiction.

The good news is, now former White House aide and podcasting mouthpiece for Trump Steve Bannon is now saying the Republicans could lose dozens of House seats in the 2026 midterms over the Trump administration’s handling of files related to disgraced financier and convicted pedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein.

“You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement,” he’s saying. “If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now … we’re gonna lose 40 seats in ’26,” he told a live audience during his “War Room” podcast. “We’re gonna lose the president.”

Where is Matt Gaetz when Trump needs him? Even Majorie Taylor Green is off the reservation over Bondi.

“I don’t accept it, and I don’t think anyone else should accept it,” she says.

That shift could trigger an upset for Republicans in the House and Senate who managed to obtain a majority in both chambers last November. Nothing else seems to convince these people to throw the bums out, even deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP benefits and threats to their Social Security.

Democrats who have been looking for a way to retake the House and Senate in 2026 may have found their answer. Maybe they can find and release the files.

Related: What To Do About Trump? Democrats Hope to Retake the House and Senate in 2026 and Impeach Him Again

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“They don’t even have to steal it,” Bannon says, “which they’re gonna try to do in ’28, because they’re gonna sit there and they go … they’ve disheartened the hardest core populist(s).”

His comments came after the Trump Justice Department and FBI released a memo concluding in its investigation that Epstein did not keep a client list, and confirming that he died by suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019. But Trump was president at the time, running for reelection against Joe Biden. He could not afford to allow his involvement with Epstein to come out.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who defended the findings during a Cabinet meeting, faces a major backlash over the memo, after she previously suggested she had a list of names “sitting on her desk.”

Conspiracy theories have swirled around Epstein’s death, including some who have suggested he was murdered. A missing minute of footage in a video shared by the DOJ to back up its memo has also raised doubts.

President Trump and others in the administration have come to her defense, despite some calls to remove her from office and after news outlets, including CNN, reported FBI Director Dan Bongino was furious over the Epstein files controversy, considering resigning and did not show up to work last Friday.

“They f‑‑‑ed up because they trusted her,” podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said about Bondi. “They were humiliated because she gave them all these binders that read ‘Epstein Files,’ you know, ‘Volume 1,’ and there was nothing new in there. Nothing? There was no scoop. Why would she do that?”

Trump also brushed off questions about Epstein during a Cabinet meeting.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” he told a reporter who asked about the disgraced financier and convicted pedophile pimp.

“You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy? This creep?” he complained. “That is unbelievable.”

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to sexual misconduct chargers. He was indicted in 2019 in federal court for allegedly leading a sex trafficking operation involving underage girls from 2002 to 2005 with his own island for parties, right out of a reality TV show.

The comics on late night television had a field day with the story.

“They made the Epstein conspiracy a center of their worldview, despite the fact that Trump and Epstein were photographed together, and partied together, and Trump called Epstein a terrific guy,” joked Seth Meyers. “And Epstein called Trump his closest friend of 10 years.”

The New York Times marveled that “a political movement that galvanized and exploded around a conspiracy theory – lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace were central to Mr. Trump’s political rise — cannibalizing itself over the mother of all modern conspiracy theories.”

“The fallout is testing the power the president holds over his most loyal followers, the ones who have trusted him all along and who believed they would learn a whole lot more about the Epstein saga if they returned Mr. Trump to office.”

“And in a twist, Mr. Trump’s usual playbook for getting himself out of trouble seemed not to be working this time — in fact, it was only making his predicament worse,” the Times reports. “In his social media post on Saturday, he tried to cast the blame for any unresolved Epstein mysteries on Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr. But the base wasn’t buying it.”

There is a feeling among some longtime supporters of Trump’s that their shared journey has reached the terra incognita.

“Trump’s persuasive power over his base, especially during his first term, was almost magical,” the prolific pro-Trump social media commentator Mike Cernovich wrote in a post on X. “The reaction on Epstein should thus be startling to him. No one is buying it. No one is dropping it.”

“People are really upset at the outright dismissal of it,” said Natalie Winters, the “War Room” correspondent and 24-year-old protégé of Bannon. “I have a good pulse on these people,” she said of Trump’s base. “I have never seen such sustained wavering.”

Those closest to Trump conceded that the president had yet to fully grasp how deep and wide the discontent was, because he doesn’t spend much time on the internet where Epstein conspiracy-mongering plays out. Despite his social media presence, Trump is a 79-year-old man whose media diet consists primarily of cable news and print newspapers.

But by Monday, news networks like CNN were devoting much more airtime to the uproar.

“This isn’t going away,” Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who served as national security adviser for a mere 24 days during the first Trump term, wrote on X. It was only a few years ago that Flynn (who has blamed a deep state conspiracy for his own ouster from government) stood in the Oval Office and told Trump that he could not trust the data in the voting machines used in the 2020 election. Now, he was demanding that the Trump administration “address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein.”

Roseanne Barr, who was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal supporters, popped off on X. “Mr. President,” she wrote, “yes, we still care about Epstein. Is there a time not to care about child sex trafficking? Read the damn room.”

The conjecture around Epstein’s crimes and death is a many-layered mania that can’t really be compared to anything else. The shadowy concepts that undergird the whole thing go to the “very foundation of MAGA,” as Winters put it, because, in her view and the view of people like her, “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.”

“I just think it’s frankly very grifty to have spent your entire career promoting, even if it weren’t the Epstein thing directly, but the idea that there is this deep state, the idea that there’s this unelected class of, you know, bankers, corporation, countries, intel agencies, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar – and I don’t believe that – or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.”

Of course he is compromised. The evidence is all over social media.

NAJ screen shot

Now that he is the one in control of the government, he is telling his supporters to move on from all of that?

No way.

“How dare you fixate on a story from the past, something Donald Trump has never done?” Meyers went on on NBC’s “Late Night”. “He’s focused on the issues of today, not the 2020 election, or the Russia investigation, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or Hillary Clinton’s email server, Joe Biden’s autopen, or Rosie O’Donnell making fun of him, or his ratings for ‘The Apprentice,’ which ended in 2015, or deceased golfer Arnold Palmer’s unusually large penis, which, by the way, we have yet to see definitive proof of.”

“Yeah, everyone from Trump supporters to Democrats are asking to see the Epstein files,” Jimmy Fallon joked. “And everyone who isn’t is definitely in those files.”

“You can’t take this away from your base — that is MAGA’s favorite conspiracy,” joked Stephen Colbert on CBS. “What are we going to find out next? That immigrants aren’t eating cats? That if you sail to the horizon, you don’t fall off the world?”

See this Video of Trump and Epstein partying on Facebook:

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