As Donald Trump tries to contain an ugly rift with his own supporters over the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal, influential media personalities in the Maga movement face a tricky dilemma. Should they close ranks with the US president – who has denounced demands for more information on Epstein as a 'waste [of] Time and Energy' about 'somebody that nobody cares about' – or pick at a political wound that the Trump administration desperately wants to scab over?
While some conservative pundits, such as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro, seem to be trying to move on, Tucker Carlson has become a persistent gadfly of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein controversy. At a political conference in Florida earlier this month, Carlson devoted much of a 45-minute speech to criticising the Trump administration and the conservative establishment from the right – for being too close to Israel; for the strike on Iran; and for failing to give the Maga movement satisfying answers to their questions about Epstein’s influence and connections.
Carlson’s speech, at a Turning Point USA event in Tampa, did not criticise Trump directly. But he compared the White House’s dismissive attitude to the Epstein story to what he described as the sneering liberal establishment that Trump campaigned against. 'The left would dismiss [critics] out of hand – “You are not worth listening to,” “Be quiet,”' Carlson told a receptive audience of young rightwing activists. Now the Trump administration was doing the same, he argued.
Carlson returned to the Epstein controversy again on Friday. In a nearly three-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, a popular podcaster, he and Cooper speculated about the sources of Epstein’s wealth and power and suggested he might have been protected by powerful people. Many in Trump’s political base believe that Epstein, who died of apparent suicide in 2019 after being charged with sexually trafficking minors, was killed so that he couldn’t reveal a 'client list' implicating other powerful men.
The current furor began when the US Department of Justice and FBI seemed to say, earlier this month, that they consider the Epstein saga closed – enraging Maga fans and sparking an unusually strong challenge to Trump’s control of the movement he founded. The controversy took another turn when, this Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump contributed a winking letter, including a doodle of a nude woman, to a Festschrift that Ghislaine Maxwell compiled in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump denied the story and, on Friday, said that he was suing the Wall Street Journal’s publisher for libel.
