U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks at a Donald Trump campaign event in Rome, Ga., in March, 2024. Now, she is in a spat with the President over the Epstein files.ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump is in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of struggling to get in front of the people he thought were behind him.
As recently as a week ago, when Mr. Trump – confident and defiant – was commanding his troops in the U.S. government shutdown and it seemed the congressional effort to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files was futile, the notion of Trump political weakness was inconceivable.
A week from now, when Tuesday’s House vote will have receded into the background, this storm may have passed and may seem like a singular diversion from the broad narrative of indomitable Trump power.
But one way or another, this episode – when a rebellion among a group of MAGA militants forced the President’s hand and prompted him into issuing ever-changing, ad-lib prevarications – stands as a sign of the possible new fragility of the alliance between the leader and his followers, with implications for national security, health care and economic policy.
It also raises the question of whether Mr. Trump is leading the MAGA movement or whether the MAGA movement is now leading Mr. Trump.
Insurgent forces and revolutionary vanguards – and Mr. Trump’s MAGA is surely one, possibly both – begin as inchoate stirrings, congeal as disciplined movements and sometimes splinter, occasionally even consuming their leaders.
The latter did not happen in the American Revolution (George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison became presidents), but it did in the French Revolution (with the demise of Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre) and, in time, in the Russian Revolution (with multiple purges and the assassination of Leon Trotsky) as well.
Mr. Trump single-handedly formed the MAGA movement and is in no danger of being toppled from it. But the iron hand of discipline that he wielded as he remade the Republican Party in his image and grafted onto it his impulses has shown signs of strain. The 427-to-one vote in the House of Representatives to release the Epstein files came after Mr. Trump desperately attempted to avoid that eventuality, finally caving when the pressure within his own movement grew too strong to resist further.
Should the Epstein files contain little of interest – and should there continue to be no evidence of Mr. Trump’s involvement with the young women and girls in the Epstein circle – the substance of this contretemps will fade swiftly. But the tensions within the GOP and MAGA may not.
The entire episode, and thus the defusing of the struggle, could have been avoided simply by a presidential order to release the documents involving Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York pointed this out when, reacting to Mr. Trump’s change of heart and change of tactics, said in a posting on X: “The vote is to compel YOU to release them. Let’s make this easier. Just release the files now.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it will win immediate approval under an unusual parliamentary maneuver that will allow Republicans in the chamber to dispose of the issue without uncomfortable debate. Mr. Trump has indicated he would sign the measure.
Epstein survivor Haley Robson holds up a photo of her younger self during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.DANIEL HEUER/AFP/Getty Images
But because the controversy dragged on, and because Mr. Trump caved to his own constituents, its meaning may be enduring, especially if Republicans seek to distance themselves from the President should economic jitters persist in the months leading to the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
Examples of Mr. Trump’s fading power include the resistance of Indiana state legislators to his entreaties to redraw the state’s congressional districts to improve the prospects of Republican candidates in next year’s midterms; the failure of Senate Republicans to embrace his demands that they alter the chamber’s filibuster rules to ease the passage of his policy priorities; the Senate vote to rescind the President’s tariffs on Brazil and its vote to do so as well with Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Canada; and the spat he is involved in with one of his most ardent backers, GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whom he described as “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene“ and dismissed in recent days as a “raving lunatic.”
Ms. Greene’s pointed response: “I forgive him and I will pray for him to return to his original MAGA promises.”
At the same time, the Republican Party – and the conservative movement over which Mr. Trump imposed firm discipline – is embroiled in a bitter dispute over antisemitism and whether to condemn the commentator Tucker Carlson, the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts.
All this may simply be a measure of the waning of power in a president’s second term, though Ronald Reagan managed to win a landmark tax overhaul in his second term and Bill Clinton continued to soar in public support even after being impeached in his second.
Mr. Trump has survived multiple challenges to his leadership, his trials in the judicial system and, in a real assassination attempt and an apparent botched one, threats on his life. Until his ascendancy in American politics, Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, Grover Cleveland and Bill Clinton were the reigning comeback artists. Mr. Trump has shattered their records.
As he pivots to address the “affordability” crisis, he may defy commentators eager to write him off as a lame duck, an 18th-century English term from the finance world that surfaced in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 Vanity Fair and was soon applied to U.S. politicians facing the end of their tenures. Joe Biden may be remembered as the classic lame-duck president after his disastrous June, 2024, debate performance led to his withdrawal from the presidential race and his substantially diminished powers thereafter.
The erosion of Mr. Trump’s sway over the MAGA movement would not be an updated example of the maxim, often attributed to Robespierre, that “the Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.” The reason: Mr. Trump is not a child of MAGA. He is the father of it.