Last Sunday, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice announced that they had concluded that Jeffrey Epstein did not have a list of clients and that the convicted sex offender and formerly well-connected financier really did die by suicide. To back that up, the DOJ released video footage from the area outside Epstein’s prison cell that they claimed was raw—although the clip’s metadata indicated it was exported from video editing software—and declared the entire case closed.…
What’s made this episode notable is not how unconvincing the government’s evidence is, and not that a politician and those he appointed completely flipped around on an issue and abandoned a campaign promise—that happens all the time. What made this particular announcement notable has been how the right is reacting to it. …
What this signals is that—for a particularly sizable segment of the people who supported and voted for Trump—this effort is not all about the individual man they voted for but the ideas behind his campaign. They do not want to make radical changes in Washington, DC, because Trump said so, but because, first and foremost, they believe that that is the best path forward and are willing to criticize Trump, and maybe even drop him, if he pivots too far away from that path.
Although this group contains some of the loudest online voices, it is still a minority within Trump’s overall base. But the fact that it exists at all is not a given. And if the principles first mindset becomes more popular on the American right, it will completely neutralize the political establishment’s co-option strategy. Corrupting the policies of one man would not be enough to kill the momentum of the anti-establishment movement more broadly.
And that’s important, because the policies needed to actually correct our country’s awful trajectory and the energy, effort, and organization required to actually bring them about are far more important than any one politician. And the right needs to act accordingly.
There’s clearly a lot of room to go. But, as Ryan McMaken, Tho Bishop, and I discussed on Power & Market last week, this level of Republican pushback against a Republican president would have been unheard of twenty years ago. Progress is being made.
My guess is that Trump and his cronies did not understand that people were supporting the policies not the personalities. They really blew this one, didn’t they? Perhaps they will claim they are playing 3D chess or maybe even 70D chess, but it looks, to me, like they were playing checkers when everyone else was playing chess. Their support has waivered and looks like there is crumbling around the edges! They will have to get back out front of the populous movement rather than behind it. I just wonder what rabbit they will be pulling out of their hats, now? Perhaps we will be hearing about outer space alien invasion next.