The cracks in Trump’s cross-class coalition are growing into a chasm. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the failure of Trump’s trade war, a sluggish economy headed for disaster, and persistent inflation have fractured MAGA. Now the Jeffrey Epstein scandal threatens to tear it apart.
Child sex trafficking has been one of the MAGA base’s central concerns from the very beginning. For years, Trump opportunistically pandered to conspiracy theories like “Pizzagate” and “QAnon.” Above all, MAGA supporters pointed to the Epstein scandal as smoking-gun proof of the establishment’s depravity. Their central demand: release Epstein’s client list and expose the elites. As Kash Patel put it in 2023, “Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.” Trump promised to do just that.
Now, he’s done a complete about face. The official White House line is: Epstein killed himself. There is no client list. Move on, nothing to see here.
Trump panicking
A few months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi confidently stated that the client list was sitting on her desk. Now, she’s backtracking and claims she meant the Epstein file in general was on her desk. She claims she can’t release it because it’s full of child porn … and by the way, the client list never existed.
When the Department of Justice released a video of Epstein’s prison cell with a minute of footage chopped, Bondi’s excuse was that it was a totally normal technical malfunction. Patel, who is now Trump’s FBI Director, has also fallen in line.
Trump is panicking. When a reporter asked about Epstein, he responded defensively: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? That is unbelievable … I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein.”
A firestorm of MAGA anger
A few days later, he posted an uncharacteristically long screed on Truth Social. Bondi is doing a “FANTASTIC JOB … we have a “PERFECT Administration,” he declaimed, before accusing “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration” of fabricating the Epstein files. He ended by begging Team MAGA to stay together and “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
But lots of people do care and there were tens of thousands of comments in reply. A small sampling is enough to see the boiling, albeit distorted, working-class rage ripping MAGA apart:
I care about the world leaders and billionaires getting away with their crimes.
We can’t call ourselves a nation of laws when people who hurt kids get to walk free just because they are wealthy and powerful.
We don’t live behind gated communities and have the luxury of body guards to keep our families safe.
Americans … are SICK of TWO-TIERED ‘just-us’ because they have money and can afford to control politicians.
You don’t understand MAGA. You didn’t create MAGA. MAGA created you.
The comments outnumber likes, indicating widespread disagreement with the post. In social media parlance, Trump has been “ratioed”—something that has never happened to him on Truth Social before.
Even if what Trump, Bondi, and Patel say is true and the Epstein case is an overblown conspiracy, the fact that so many hardcore MAGA supporters no longer believe them is a sign of impending catastrophe for Trump’s unstable and erratic regime.
Polling disaster
Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” Now, some in MAGA’s base see Trump as the same “deep-state” beast they elected him to destroy. To them, he’s conducting a massive cover-up to protect himself and his pedophile billionaire buddies. Many are quoting what Trump told New York Magazine about Epstein in 2002: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Recent YouGov polls found 67% of respondents are not confident that “all people connected with Jeffrey Epstein who are alleged to have committed sex crimes will be thoroughly investigated.” 79% of Americans, including 75% of Republicans, want all of the Epstein documents released to the public. Two-thirds of the public believe Trump’s administration is deliberately covering up evidence on the Epstein case, including half of all Republicans!
Failure after failure
Even before the Epstein fiasco, Trump’s approval rating was slipping. Among those under 30, his approval fell from 53.1% in November 2024 to 28.9% in early July. The MAGA youth are the angriest about this scandal. At the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, 7,000 students loudly applauded when asked if they care about Epstein.
Trump was already floundering on nearly every other issue. His trade war fiasco is starting to show in higher prices. The inflation rate rose to 2.7% in June, and worse is yet to come. 51% of Americans believe that the economy is getting worse, up from 37% when Trump was inaugurated.
Meanwhile, his “Big Beautiful Bill” pleases no one but himself. Billionaires like Elon Musk hate that it will add trillions to the debt, while only 30% of ordinary Americans believe it will have a positive effect on the country. 54% say it will have a negative effect, and 47% say it will negatively affect them personally. Many areas that voted for Trump will be among the most affected by his cuts to food stamps and Medicaid.
Further afield, Trump inserted the US into Israel’s “12-day war” with Iran, nearly sparking another of the “forever wars” he swore were a thing of the past. In Ukraine, not only did he fail to end the imperialist proxy-war against Russia in 24 hours as promised—now, he’s sending more weapons to Ukraine.
He’s in a bind on immigration, too. After pandering to his base with vicious ICE raids, Trump is now talking about “amnesty” for some undocumented immigrants. Trump wants to distract from his failures by scapegoating and attacking immigrants, but at the same time, he’s under pressure from agribusiness and hospitality billionaires who don’t want to be deprived of the cheap labor they exploit.
MAGA civil war
For many in MAGA, Trump’s betrayal over Epstein is a red line. They voted for him because they saw him as the only man standing against the hated establishment that has presided over decades of declining living standards. As Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, “I just think that it’s a punch in the gut when regular people go to jail all the time, when they mess up and do something wrong, and then it always seems the rich, powerful elites escape.”
Trump’s inability to keep his base happy isn’t a personal failure—it was inevitable from the start. MAGA is a coalition between classes at war, and peace is impossible in this epoch of capitalist decline. MAGA isn’t over yet, but the Epstein debacle is a major milestone in its process of collapse.
There is a boiling rage in the working class against the capitalists. In the absence of a revolutionary alternative, some of it found a distorted expression in Trumpism. But sooner or later, it will express itself in explosions of class struggle. Exciting opportunities are coming for the RCA to connect with this rage and organize it into a force to overthrow this rotten system for good.
