I think a good part of MAGA are just contrarians: they’re against everything, but especially against anything that seems vaguely mainstream. Trump speaks that language complete with uncomplicated villains and one-sentence solutions. Trump is against his own policies as soon as they’ve taken hold. That’s how he keeps his base - [It] is bad, because of [these] people, but I’ll fix it.

He can’t commandeer Epstein that way, because every possible Epstein-villain group includes Trump. The disciples who can still support him are stuck with the ‘God works through flawed messenger’ narrative, and that doesn’t work on the contrarians. ‘Flawed messenger’ is for the evangelicals who have an actual agenda and see Trump as a tool to work that agenda.