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| By Bari Weiss |
Before we dive into the news, some news of our own: The Free Press app is here and it’s gorgeous. It’s in the Apple App Store. It’s in the Google Play store. And it’s being downloaded like . . . what’s the simile here? Is it still hotcakes? I’ll put it this way: It’s being downloaded like a product that is very popular (it’s the No. 4 news app on the App Store!) because it’s excellent and everyone loves it.
It’s the way to make sure you never miss a Free Press story. And it’s got everything we do; everything we write and record and film. It’s free. It’s easy to use. You get all our reporting. You get all our commentary. All our podcasts and videos. So: Go download it now. You’ll be glad you did.
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The Great MAGA Civil War
So it’s come to this: a showdown between President Donald Trump and MAGA over Jeffrey Epstein. That was the big news of this week, and The Free Press was all over it.
As Nellie put it over at TGIF, the emergence of the Epstein-truther movement represents the “first real, broad anti-Trump faction within the right.” But why is this the issue that’s caused the first rupture between Trump and his base? And why is this the moment that this is happening?
We think there are many ways of answering those questions. Many ways of seeing this—and every—complicated story.
What we try to do at The Free Press is capture the kind of discussions we are having among ourselves in our newsroom and publish the sharpest, smartest version for you.
And that’s what we delivered this week.
We ran six pieces on all this—and they are all worth your time.
Josh Hammer explains who stands to gain from this story. Specifically, why the leading lights of the MAGA media universe, such as Tucker Carlson, will always be talking about Epstein—and why it serves them bigly.
Park MacDougald untangles the politics of this fight. Park argues that this is “the first sustained crisis” of Trump’s presidency. But it’s not really about Epstein; it’s about Iran.
“If you are wondering why Carlson and Bannon might play arson with the Trump coalition, you likely haven’t been following the foreign policy debates that have wracked Trump’s second administration since he took office,” Park writes. “Carlson and Bannon were both adamant, almost hysterical opponents of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in June. Both issued dark warnings that Iran strikes would splinter Trump’s base and lead to a disastrous war that would derail the entire administration, and both would emerge from that dispute with egg on their face as none of their predictions came true.”
Freddie deBoer goes to the real story. Forget the conspiracies, Freddie says. The Epstein phenomenon distracts from a horrifically rampant problem in America: child sexual abuse.
“There are secrets to be unearthed and more justice to be done. But fundamentally, the fixation on Jeffrey Epstein seems like a classic matter of displacement to me, where a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a target that is in some way more palatable to target,” Freddie writes.
“Jeffrey Epstein, a single human, and his potential conspirators, a limited number of specific miscreants, are easier to hate than a whole world of quietly evil anonymous child predators. These theories may be more or less true, but they are always conspiracies of convenience.”
For more, check out this piece from Daniel Bates, who’s been covering the Epstein saga for more than a decade.
And then there’s this from Tina Brown, who finds herself nodding along with the conspiracy theorists on this one.
Meantime, our own Peter Savodnik has had more than enough:
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An Absolutely Wild Story
The first thing I have to talk about here is River Page’s insightful look at . . . well, I think the headline captures it.
It was an amazing little scam, and one that shines a light on the spirit of our times. The author of these truly terrible poems, River writes, “walked me through his process of creating elaborate characters with over-the-top biographies and terrible writing styles. According to him, whenever editors asked to meet on Zoom or record his voice for readings of the poems, he could just brush them off with comments like, ‘Oh, I don’t like the sound of my own voice.’ When they asked for pictures, it was easy to just decline.”
You have to read this piece.
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The End of an Era
You’ll remember the name Uri Berliner—the longtime NPR senior editor who blew the whistle on his old employer in these pages last year. Here’s the piece in case you missed it then.