It’s a political base problem few are willing to admit.
Republicans are imploding over Jeffrey Epstein, and the evidence is hard to miss. The panic among GOP lawmakers is unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of reporting on Congress.
Republicans can’t keep their heads down and trust that the base will keep holding them up, because the Republican base is what’s causing the current panic.
Far-right lawmakers are anxiously trying to navigate around the Scylla of Trump and congressional leadership pushing them to hold off on the Epstein issue, and the Charybdis of the hot-headed multitudes who lifted them into office after getting them to promise to reveal every dark secret of the Epstein case.
You’re right about the majority of his base who are all in on the cult and will never change their minds. But he had a lot of help from other demographics who aren’t in the cult like those who are Q first or independents who thought he’d improve the economy ‘like he did in his last term’ LOfuckingL.
We gotta watch the polls, he’s trending down over the last months and this surely isn’t helping. He’ll probably never drop below 35% ish but the closer he gets to that the less power he has because a great majority of his power is derived from the bully pulpet.
Idk, my dad is one of the classic conservatives and definitely doesn’t fall into the maga camp, even going so far as to tell my mom he hated trump (only after his loss to Biden but before j6). I see him as a pretty run of the mill republican that represents a wide swath of the voting right. Anyone that watches Fox news is actively looking to convince themselves of the rhetoric. It’s especially easy to weather all of this right now because they have another year before the migrant caravan magically shows up to distract them again before midterms. That, or the Clinton flight logs which somehow absolves trump of his relation to Epstein.