Marjorie Taylor Greene Knows What MAGA Wants: War on Trump’s Enemies

This woman knows the MAGA id better than anyone. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

There’s a real division of opinion in the chattering classes about Donald Trump’s efforts to tamp down demands from his own supporters for disclosures involving Jeffrey Epstein and his notorious “files.” Last week, the conventional wisdom in the mainstream media and even some conservative outlets was that MAGA hunger for Epstein dirt was a big movement-threatening problem for the president that he could not wave away. But now, after Trump went medieval on The Wall Street Journal for its report that he wrote a sexually suggestive 50th-birthday card to Epstein in 2003, most Trump-adjacent media “influencers” have closed ranks behind their warrior-king. Laura Loomer put it best in an interview with the New York Times:

Laura Loomer, another of Mr. Trump’s influential, far-right supporters, said in an interview that while many supporters remained frustrated by the lack of promised transparency in the Epstein case, the news story, which she believed “falsely accused” the president of writing the letter, “reunited” the MAGA movement. 

She said that it made Mr. Trump’s followers realize: “Hey, we may be frustrated with Attorney General Pam Blondie, as I call her, but Trump is still our guy.”

It now appears the House, a fever swamp of bipartisan Epstein-files demands just a few days ago, will be able to go on a monthlong recess without a vote on the subject. Another notable sign of the changing winds was the triumphant claim by columnist Miranda Devine of the New York Post (a sister outlet of The Wall Street Journal) that Trump had “won” the “Epstein battle.”

But while it’s very clear much of the mainstream media overestimated the vulnerability of Trump’s hold on his base in suggesting the Epstein saga might cause a MAGA crack-up, it’s also clear the same media observers may misunderstand the dynamics of the “crisis” and what might come next. Coincidentally or not, around the time MAGA seemed to pivot back into alignment with Trump, he began a series of wild Truth Social posts revolving around fantasies of Barack Obama and other leading Democrats — most of them no longer in public office — being arrested, booked, or jailed. The consensus reaction was that was part of the president’s efforts to “distract” his base from the Epstein story he was trying so hard to shove off the stage.

But maybe that’s too subtle an interpretation. That inveterate Trump channeler and cheerleading Marjorie Taylor Greene issued a stark warning to the Boss about what the base wanted and expected:

It’s important to remember that teasing the Epstein files was just one of many, many promises Trump made before and during the 2024 campaign to hold his enemies accountable for their alleged treason to America and their alleged persecution of Trump himself. A pledge to seek revenge for the terrible crimes of these terrible, America-hating people was arguably the other side of the Make American Great Again coin: Those who destroyed American greatness had to punished, not simply ejected from office. And as MTG made clear, Trump made a contract with his most loyal supporters to “take down every enemy of The People” the minute the president had the power to do so.

So perhaps it wasn’t coincidental at all that Trump began projecting fantasies of a big roundup of “enemies of the people” right in the middle of the pivot away from Epstein. And perhaps it also wasn’t coincidental that a couple of days earlier Trump’s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard asked the Justice Department to go after Obama and members of his administration for allegedly fabricating evidence that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. It could all represent an effort to scratch the itch that underlines MAGA interest in the Epstein files. The question is whether the president will just keep teasing vengeance or give people like MTG the investigations, arrests, show trials, and firing squads they crave more than any dirt on Jeffrey Epstein and his creepy associates.