MAGA, Elon, and the Epstein Flip-Flop: MAGAReport 6/8/25
MAGA sides with Trump on anything. How that's playing out with the Epstein kerfuffle and the psychology behind it
Trump and Elon’s epic Friday fallout is still rippling through the MAGA community.
Generally, the MAGA spaces I monitor are unfailingly in support of Trump. As I have mentioned in previous MAGAReports, they will change positions on issues almost at the drop of a hat if Trump says to. They bragged about how he was going to end Russia’s war on Ukraine on the first day, and now are like “That’s dumb and we should stay out of it.” Grocery prices? End of the world to meh. Gaza? Shrug.
But the Epstein files have been a rare departure from the Trump cheerleading. The community is obsessed with the Epstein files, and one of Trump’s campaign promises was to release them. Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) were both tasked with getting them released, and there has been much complaining within the MAGA community about the fact that they still aren’t out.
So it was quite a thing when Elon posted on Friday that the reason they hadn’t been released is that Trump was in them. One of the threads about this has 930 comments, one of the highest response counts I’ve ever seen. The quick response was “Well obviously Trump is in them because he was subpoened and we knew this already. I’m sure he’s in the clear” but also - why exactly haven’t those files been released??
In the thread about Elon’s post, you can see some of the consternation about the files still manifesting. These were posted Friday afternoon in the middle of the breakup.
sigh...I guess we'll really know soon
You mean in two more weeks?
Maybe this will help grow Trumps ever shrinking balls back and force him to get his AG to release the list?
He doesn't need the AG to release the list.
If he had any balls, he'd go all in. He alone has the absolute power to declassify anything and everything he wants. JUST. RELEASE. IT. ALL!!!
Everything. As is. Unredacted.
Then tell the world to fuck off. Heads would roll, but I'd bet a lot of money his would not be among them.
Trump ordered the JFK files declassified in his 1st term. Pompeo sat on it.
But the thing about this corner of MAGA is that their identities are tied up in Trump’s success. When your identity is tied to someone or something else, it’s very hard to deal with that someone or something being in the wrong. We see this in other contexts, like some fandoms, co-dependent relationships, and also Collective Narcissism, which I wrote about in an earlier post.
Cognitively, it’s much easier to rationalize why they are failing by blaming something else. You can see that in the last post of the little thread above where someone blames Pompeo for not doing something Trump said he would do in his first term. And over the weekend, the MAGA faithful have been trying to rationalize why Trump wouldn’t release the Epstein files. With the accusation from Musk, it’s not enough to blame other people for the slowdown because that doesn’t combat the accusation very well.
What they’ve come up with is that they can’t release the files because they include thousands of hours of child pornography. This arises from a statement Kash Patel made a few weeks ago, arguing that the reason the files hadn’t been released is because they need to review all that footage. That somehow turned into “of course we can’t release everything.” Some comments to this effect:
A problem with releasing videos is if it shows a minor engage in sex with anyone or even unclothed, they can’t release it without editing (blurring) the minor or they become guilty of distributing child porn. I think some mouths over ran some asses and now they are caught in a catch 22.
A full dump of the Epstein files includes something like 14 TERAbytes of digital video, including untold amounts of what would be classified as child porn.
So Elon wants up to 14 TERAbytes released?
Is he gonna host it all, including child porn on X?Pretty much. The highest upvoted post on this thread is people demanding that they immediately release 1000s of hours of child porn.
There are also a lot of comments about how Trump can sleep with anyone he wants so why would he sleep with underaged girls, and then also a lot of replies that sometimes you can’t tell if a girl is underaged. I interpret this latter part as laying the groundwork of a defense in case it is released that Trump had sex with teenagers.
Overall, this breakup has been hard for the community who really liked having Elon on their team. That said, what’s happening with ICE in LA is their main focus as of today, Sunday 6/8, and I think we may see some dramatic stuff with that coming up. More soon.