Why The Epstein Thing Is Different:

Driven by a burning desire to be loved and adored, Trump softened his stance on the vaccine as an unmitigated good by reminding people they had the right to refuse the vaccine and die of COVID if they felt that would sufficiently trigger the libs. The booing stopped. The cheering resumed.

The American right’s confusion about why Trump won’t release the files seems sincere. In the bad-faith reality they’ve carefully pieced together over the years, the Epstein files are filled only with the names of their enemies, of Democrats and rich libs and maybe anti-Trump Republicans and other members of the so-called globalist agenda. This is pure projection, as the American right has a pedophilia problem that goes beyond coincidence, in ways that are never acknowledged by mainstream media outlets afraid of Trump and his allies.

If Trump is on that list – and even a reasonable person might guess he is at this point in the Epstein proceedings – their entire world collapses. The Jenga pieces go everywhere. They will know – somehow for the first time in their miserable lives – that they are in fact the baddies.

For ten years Trump has been the all-powerful vehicle for the American right’s ferocious fight against marginalized groups they fear and loathe. Their pulsating fear of cultural dethronement – being usurped by different races or genders or sexualities – left them no choice, again and again, but to rally around Trump and beg him to do their dirty work, to exact pain and suffering on human beings who threatened their place in the hierarchy of oppression. And Trump has delivered every time.

The more victimized Trump becomes, the stronger his bond becomes with Americans who see him as their living revenge against those who dared make their voices heard for a fleeting moment in the racial justice movement of 2020.

... Trump’s inaction is the first real acknowledgment that his disciples have built their political house on sand. Suddenly, for the first time, they are feeling the foundation of their politics and worldview shift beneath their feet. They’re asking – begging – Trump to make that foundation solid once again by simply being transparent and exposing the pedophilia ring that was meant to bring down his opposition, once and for all. That he won’t, and that he keeps telling his most ardent worshippers to shut up about Epstein, has created an instability that Trump folks can’t tolerate.