Name: Divisions rise in MAGA base as Trump calls them 'weaklings' | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:20:10.000Z
Duration: 22 min 39 s
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U.S. President Donald Trump has turned on members of his MAGA movement amid growing divisions in his usually loyal base.

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Posting on his Truth Social network, he called them weaklings.

Many of them accused the Trump administration of covering up information on child sex offender

Jeffrey Epstein and his possible accomplices, despite the administration's promises of full transparency.

For a long time, it seemed that President Donald Trump could do no wrong in the eyes of his supporters.

But the U.S. administration's handling of the Epstein case is raising eyebrows.

So, are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

In particular, they're talking about a supposed client list, which allegedly details the names of people to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked teenage girls for sexual abuse.

Before he returned to the White House, Trump and other right-wing figures accused the Biden administration of keeping the list secret to protect paedophiles.

And in February, Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi said the list was sitting on a desk.

The Trump administration having to backpedal on its former claims and defend a decision not to release further files related to the case.

It's caused an uproar in and outside of the White House.

The American people deserve to know the truth.

What, if anything, is the Trump administration and the Department of Justice hiding?

That's the question on many people's minds.

Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking trial sparked years of speculation about whom the convicted sex offender helped to abuse young women and teenage girls.

And whether he really died by suicide or if he was murdered to protect the rich and influential.

Trump's MAGA movement has been particularly obsessed with the Epstein case, hoping it would prove the existence of a so-called deep state, protecting Satanists and paedophiles.

In an about turn, President Trump has now publicly said that more information about the case can be released after all, while continuing to downplay its importance.

Whether a real instruction or an off-the-cuff comment to appease his base, arguably for the first time ever, Donald Trump is having to contend with the fact that the loyalty of his supporters has limits when it comes to one of their favorite conspiracy theories.

And many MAGA experts think it'll be Pam Bondi who will take the fall for it.

Glenn Thrush reports on the U.S. Justice Department for the New York Times, who's been covering the case extensively.

I asked him what he thinks of the Trump administration's claim that there's nothing to see here.

Well, from everything that we know, and there have been a series of investigations into the Epstein case, starting under the Biden administration.

Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in New York City in 2019.

There was a coroner's investigation in New York.

There was an Office of the Inspector General investigation that determined he had died of a suicide and there was no foul play involved.

And then there was this longer FBI and Justice Department investigation, which also uncovered no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

All we can say is we have done interviews with investigators over the years.

We have done a fairly extensive review in various reporters in our newsroom and other newsrooms and no one has uncovered any specific connections between Trump and Epstein other than business connections and some fairly superficial social interactions that are well documented on video and in photographs.

So the problem here is Epstein is one of the true villains of our age.

He had all kinds of relationships with the rich and powerful.

So what we know is, from what we've heard from the investigative material, is that apparently there are no larger connections to Trump.

But again, you know, there are perhaps unknowns.

What then do you think is prompting all this flip-flopping, not just of the president, but also his attorney general and FBI director?

So what people don't understand necessarily, who aren't in this fever swamp of Washington,

D.C. and American politics right now, is that the energy of the Epstein conspiracy movement is almost religious.

And while the Epstein case does not reflect positively on President Trump, the underlying assumptions of the conspiracists, that there's a shady government cabal of rich and powerful people who are covering up these monstrous crimes, is very much the stock and trade of the Trump movement.

And all of these officials, we have three key officials who are involved in this.

The attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of

Florida, who's sort of a conventional Trump-aligned law enforcement official.

And then you have these two men who are running the FBI, Kash Patel, the director, and Dan

Bongino, his number two, who are both creatures of this Trump outsider movement.

Both of those individuals do not have conventional credentials to be occupying the top positions at the FBI.

And prior to being there, they were both podcasters and social media personalities who promoted conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.

So you have this instance in which they are being called upon to slam the door, essentially, on a door they themselves kicked open.

So what then should we expect from this administration regarding this case?

Does Pam Bondi open the doors and hand over the documents, or is there likely to be more flip-flopping?

Number two, the question is, what is there to hand over?

Part of the question here is whether or not this treasure trove that people presume exists, exists.

The main thing that's become the talisman, the totem of this case, is the so-called Jeffrey

Well, we've been told from investigators in both administrations, the Biden administration and Trump administration, that such a list doesn't exist.

Most of those names are out there in public already.

But we have been told both now and before that such a client list doesn't exist.

The other issue is there are tens of thousands of hours of video evidence that the FBI and

Some of it involved Epstein's death and the surveillance video, which has some gaps in it from the federal prison in New York City where he died.

But most of it are videos and photographic evidence that include child pornography, surveillance tapes that would continue to harm victims and potential witnesses in cases.

So the question is, what is it that we're looking for?

What we have reported, what I have been able to surface, is that dozens and dozens of FBI agents, dozens and dozens of Department of Justice prosecutors have spent six weeks or so in a facility just outside of Washington, D.C. over the past six months going through every scrap of evidence that the government has.

And they found insufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution.

And that's what prompted the memo we saw the week before last closing the case.

Thanks for joining us, Glenn, and talking us through that.

Let's explore with Ben Smith, who's co-founder and editor-in-chief of the global news website

The so-called Epstein files, they're meat and drink to conspiracy theorists.

But you don't have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to find the Trump administration's flip-flopping on this.

I kind of think you do have to be wearing a tinfoil hat, honestly.

I mean, this is a genuinely, as Trump said, boring and sordid story.

That has been very, very intensely investigated by every journalist in the United States and every law enforcement body in the U.S. for more than a decade.

The document that sometimes gets referred to really totally inaccurately as a client list, which is Epstein's address book, was put on the Internet by Gawker 10 years ago.

There are various searchable versions on there.

His co-conspirator in this really disgusting abuse of young women, which is very well documented, has been in jail for years.

If she had anything to offer the government, if she had revelations implicating whichever

Democrat Trump hates, she probably would have given that up at this point.

I think it's in a way a sort of pizza gate for people with college educations.

It's a sex trafficking conspiracy theory that's fun to talk about, but really the more you look at it, the less there is there.

I mean, I think there is a very good reason that Trump is so sensitive about it, which is that in a totally non-conspiratorial, utterly public way in the 90s and I think the late 80s, he and Jeffrey Epstein were friends.

And Epstein said to the author, Michael Wolff, that he was Trump's best friend.

I don't know if that's true, but that is obviously the thing that Trump is embarrassed about.

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Divisions rise in MAGA base as Trump calls them 'weaklings' | DW News

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