On Thursday afternoon, Melania Trump stepped before the podium to answer the questions about her relationship with the dead financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that nobody had really been asking.
In her heavily accented English and faltering delivery, the US first lady told the public that “the lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today”.
Stony-faced and sombre, she declared, in a deadpan delivery reminiscent of Arnie in his Terminator years, that “I never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach.”
It was an extraordinary moment in that it brought Epstein and his ghastly grin caroming back into the headlines for the first time since the United States had attacked Iran.
RM Block
Melania Trump has been in the US for long enough to understand the current of salaciousness running beneath the surface of puritanism. Half of her audience was scrolling through their phones to try to find out what these “lies” might be even before she finished reading her statement. The snap theory was that the office of the first lady was trying to get in ahead of a damaging upcoming story. There were mixed reports as to whether US president Donald Trump had any knowledge that his wife was even making her statement. But they are busy people, and it’s a big house.
At around the same time, Donald was cranking up his Truth Social feed to lay waste to the highest rank of conservative podcast hosts and influencers, name-checking Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones for their loudening criticisms over the Iran war and dismissing them as having “one thing in common, Low IQs” and in full capitals as “NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS” who will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity. He finished by offering brief and colourful synopses of their individual careers.
Even by Trump’s standards, the post was a psychologically valuable insight to the simmering frustrations he feels at the increasingly emboldened critiques from platforms he had, until recently, counted on to support his agenda.
There is a kernel of truth in Trump’s complaint about podcast culture. The phenomenal rise in popularity and influence of conservative – and liberal – ideologues runs parallel to the vast amount of wealth the platforms generate for their hosts.
The mystery of the mass popularity of these often-meandering and stupefyingly dull broadcasts will become part of the future analyses of the Trump era in American life. But those voices have replaced the void left by the televangelists of old. As he made his rapid move from joke outsider to president-elect a decade ago, Trump’s instincts made him more malleable to the uses of alternative media – an instinct he demonstrated again in defeating Kamala Harris two years ago. He knows how damaging this outbreak of open warfare can quickly become.
[ Iran war opens a dangerous new front for the US president: his Maga baseOpens in new window ]
“They’re not MAGA, they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA,” the president’s post stated.
“I could get them on my side any time I want but I no longer care about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our country. MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear weapons.”
But the alliance of disparate prejudices and beliefs that Trump gathered under the Maga umbrella has been fragmenting for some time and, just as the administration is under intense pressure from the uncontrollable consequences of its war of choice with Iran, a stark split in loyalty over Trump’s alliance with Binyamin Netanyahu, stubborn inflation numbers, discontent at the gas pump and grim forecasts on the November midterm elections, the president’s most valuable disseminators of the message have turned on him.
The key difference between Trump and Maga advocates such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has emerged as his most potent critic in recent months, is that they are fundamentalists. Trump’s failure, since returning to office in January of last year, has been to not go far enough in delivering his promises to unmake institutional Washington and to remake America as promised.
This week, Taylor Greene was a guest on Alex Jones’s podcast. While Carlson and Megyn Kelly made the transition from mainstream media to lone operator with phenomenal success, Jones is the sui generis of the form – a Texan college dropout who built a radio following and broadcast early internet shows from his home opining on all sorts of conspiracy theories.
In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in compensation to the families of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting a decade earlier – after his notorious claims that the entire atrocity had been a hoax – and to liquidate his assets, in the region of $4 million to $6 million. Jones’s interview with Trump in December 2015 was one of the New York businessman’s first critical steps in gaining momentum as an anti-establishment political disrupter.
Now, Jones was broadcasting in elegiac tones about how “sad” he is about what has become of the president.
“Trump’s own wife came out in an unannounced press conference today and said the Epstein crimes are real and that she wants the victims to be in front of Congress and the cover-up to end. That’s the opposite of what Trump is saying,” Jones said. “Am I naive? Did I defend Trump too long?”
Megyn Kelly told her listeners that Fox News has become an “insufferable” cheerleading show of the war while Taylor Greene, in her appearance with Jones, explained why she thinks the demise of Trump’s second term can be traced to the decision to get rid of Elon Musk’s unofficial role in the government.
“I was chair of the Doge subcommittee so we saw early that they were unwilling to truly do this work – to get rid of the waste, fraud and abuse, to totally gut the government. They refused to do it. It got killed. Doge is totally done. It was one of the most popular things, along with border security, mass deportations, America First, lower inflation, lower the cost of living – those were the core components of the campaign. And my God, gut the deep state. Hold people accountable.
“Going forward in the future, Alex, this is the discussion we need to keep having. We need to make sure we are guiding the ship because president Trump is soon to be the past, and everyone needs to start looking past him. President Trump is going to be gone very soon.”
For years, Trump conducted the tenor and message of these conversations and the orchestra never missed a note. But the music has stopped. Now, the gossip is flying and the president can do little to silence it.
