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Welcome back to False Flag! A week after the Justice Department tried to close the Jeffrey Epstein case with no new information, the situation is threatening to blow up Trump world by dividing some of the most loyal parts of the president’s base.
Despite Trump’s best efforts, these rifts aren’t going away, so I figured it was time we got to know the different factions. We’re keeping this one unlocked because, in our extremely weird reality, this is the closest I’ll probably get to public-service journalism. But, as always, we appreciate the support of our members, which makes our work possible.
And now’s a great time for YOU to become a member. Upgrade to Bulwark+ today and get the next 30 days FREE to see what all the fuss is about—to see why so many of our members say we help keep them sane.
–Will
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The Leopard Will Eat the Face
TRUMP WORLD FELL INTO CHAOS just before the weekend, as the shock from the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein memo continued to reverberate. Donald Trump’s initial response—a long Saturday-afternoon post that urged everyone to just get over it—earned the president a rare hostile “ratio” on Truth Social, his own social media platform. Even right-wing media figures who would normally fall in line behind the president took issue with his long, meandering, often self-contradictory statement, apparently unwilling to alienate their Epstein-crazed audiences.
Maybe worse, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—whose high level of interest in the public’s view of him has been a recurring subject of this newsletter—appeared on the verge of resigning in outrage over Attorney General Pam Bondi’s move to declare the Epstein case closed. (Bongino did reportedly show up to work today, which we didn’t realize was optional for the second in command at the FBI.)
Everyone, it seems, now hates everyone else. Which was the perfect backdrop for all of them to congregate at a big party in Florida, the perfect location for a mid-July gathering!
Administration officials and MAGA luminaries like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson descended upon Tampa last weekend for Charlie Kirk’s Student Action Summit. In its first iteration of the new Trump term, Turning Point USA’s recurring young-conservative confab should’ve been a celebration. Instead, it became a fraught family reunion where attendees publicly tried to hash out whether everyone should just swallow their pride and move on from the Epstein saga as Trump had directed them to do.
Over the course of the event, it became clear that there are now five distinct Epstein factions within the MAGA movement, creating a type of factionalism that is uncommon among Trump’s backers. Here, dear reader, is your handy guide to those factions.
1. The “Get Over It” Crowd
If Trump’s remarks before his cabinet meeting on Tuesday about getting over Epstein didn’t send a clear enough message to his allies, his farcical allegation over Truth Social on Saturday that Barack Obama had somehow tampered with or even fabricated the Epstein files made it clear that he’s not reopening the Epstein investigation and folks should give it up.
That prompted some of the right’s biggest names to, finally, fall in line. FBI Director Kash Patel, who declared before taking office that the FBI director controlled Epstein’s “black book” and that Trump should campaign on a promise to “roll [it] out,” said on X on Saturday that “the conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been.”
But no one swung on Epstein harder or more clumsily than Charlie Kirk himself. As the possibility of Dan Bongino’s resignation loomed, Kirk appeared at a conference event on Friday alongside fellow MAGA travelers Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon to fume together about the lack of Epstein disclosure.
Kirk complained that the media wasn’t asking enough questions about Epstein. In one of the weekend’s more amusing speeches, he complained that shadowy forces had tricked Posobiec when attorney general Pam Bondi gave him one of the cursed “Epstein binders.”
“Jack was used,” Kirk said of Posobiec, not exactly in a friendly way.
“And like a sap, you believed them,” Bannon added to Posobiec.
Posobiec scowled.
But then Kirk started to shift. On Saturday—the same day he reportedly received a phone call from Trump attempting to rein him in—Kirk said he had reviewed an email exchange about the memo’s release that supposedly cleared Attorney General Pam Bondi of being implicated in any kind of coverup. (That Kirk is being used to vouch for the credibility of the attorney general is a remarkable sign of the times.)
Then on Monday, Kirk went a step further and announced on his show that he was moving on from the Epstein issue until further notice.
“Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being,” Kirk said. “I’m going to trust my friends in the administration. I’m going to trust my friends in the government.”
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