The Epstein affair has turned the MAGA narrative on its head

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Who’s the big-government protector of the elites now?

For years, the narrative in the MAGA movement – the notion that fuelled Donald Trump’s ascent in politics – was that a self-serving, self-protecting group of elites and insiders had outsize influence in the United States, with tentacles reaching into every aspect of American financial, cultural and political life.

But the Jeffrey Epstein affair has taken a surprising and perhaps significant turn – and has turned the assumptions on their head.

Now the force seen guarding the secrets is Mr. Trump’s own administration. Now the insiders with the power to suppress information are Trump appointees. Now Washington is in thrall not to the Barack Obama or Joe Biden administrations, nor to a cabal of liberals, nor to other powerful interests but instead to the conservatives who have power in all three branches of the American government. Now, Mr. Trump’s apparent presence in suppressed Epstein files, suggests a conspiracy embedded in conspiracy theories.

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So now, some MAGA activists, influencers, and lawmakers have reached an arresting conclusion: Elites R Us.

Or that many in the Trump-controlled government are.

One telling piece of evidence was this week’s vote in the House oversight subcommittee on federal law enforcement to force the Justice Department to release its Epstein files. The resolution was introduced by Representative Summer Lee, a Pennsylvania Democrat who holds views − she’s a strong opponent of natural-gas fracking and of Israeli war policy in Gaza – deeply antagonistic to Mr. Trump and his adherents.

Of all the astonishing developments on Capitol Hill this year, the phenomenon of a measure sponsored by Ms. Lee (a member of the “Squad” group of ultra progressives that has won the special enmity of Mr. Trump) winning the support of Representatives Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Brian Jack of Georgia, a White House political director in the first Trump administration (three ardent MAGA-oriented Republican lawmakers) stands out.

Now, according to House rules, the full House oversight committee, which is led by Representative James Comer of Kentucky, another strong Trump supporter, must press for the release of the files. Separately, Mr. Comer on Wednesday subpoenaed Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker now serving a prison sentence, to testify before the committee in two weeks.

“The ghost of the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein is haunting our Republican colleagues,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, said in floor remarks.

The Epstein affair is just the latest flowering of the anti-elite impulse that has been a hardy perennial in U.S. history. Indeed, insurgencies based on resentment of these elites have sprung up in the 18th, 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries.

Many of these movements have roots in rural areas, where farm rebellions have had enormous impact since the earliest days of the country.

One of them produced the Populist Party, which under presidential nominee James B. Weaver carried five rural states in 1892. Its views were co-opted by the Democrats who, four years later, adopted much of its platform and nominated the populist William Jennings Bryan for president. In the past century, agrarian rebellions have sprouted throughout the agrarian Midwest, especially in Iowa, which was the site of a violent 1931 “cow war” that culminated in dairy farmers emptying milk cans into streets around Sioux City.

Henry Wallace – Iowa-based magazine editor, a pioneer of corn-hog ratio charts, twice a cabinet secretary, a vice-president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the rebel 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate – called these sorts of insurrectionists warriors in a “bitter struggle.” Three-quarters of a century later, in another form of anti-elite rural rebellion, the Associated Press found that Mr. Trump won rural voters by a margin of 62 to 36 per cent in the 2024 election, and the Economic Innovation Group, which focuses on distressed areas, found that 93 per cent of rural counties voted for Mr. Trump.

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“We are a country founded on revolution against the colonial elite,” Michael Kazin, a Bryan biographer and the author of the book The Populist Persuasion: An American History, said in an interview. “Ever since then, anti-elitism movements have been popular on both the left and the right. Since the New Deal and especially in the Trump years, populists have railed against elites, now including Columbia and Harvard.

“Now,” he continued, “it’s not a large step from saying the liberal government is corrupt to saying everyone involved in government is corrupt – even though now it’s run by Trump.”

Mr. Trump, a hotel, resort and casino magnate, may seem an unlikely anti-elitist, but in truth he was a New York City outsider, largely because the ruling cultural and financial elites regarded him as vulgar in taste and comportment. And in American history, some members of the governing elites had anti-elite impulses.

One was the wealthy land speculator Andrew Jackson. Another was FDR, who was the fifth cousin of a president, was ranked by the 24/7 Wall St. financial news platform the ninth wealthiest president, and was a graduate of two of Mr. Trump’s biggest targets, Harvard and Columbia universities. In his first inaugural address, in 1933, he said, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

FDR was called a “traitor to his class.” Mr. Trump – with three marriages and a louche lifestyle inconsistent with the values of some of his supporters – repeatedly has weathered crises that have endangered his coalition. Even so, it is clear he senses that, in the Epstein matter, he may be vulnerable to charges he is a traitor to his movement.