The MAGA-Epstein Meltdown

What happens when a cult confronts cognitive dissonance.

I’m Smart / I Was Scammed

On March 25^th, 2000, a group of polygamist Mormons put on their temple Whites and gathered in a small church in the town of Manti, Utah. They were there for a feast which Jesus Christ Himself would attend, at least according to their prophet James Harmston. For months, he had been ranting about how the end was nigh, the wondrous visions he’d had of fire and brimstone and the destruction of the US Government. He had never been so certain of anything in his life. This is it, you guys, get ready…

Then on March 26^th, Harmston blamed his followers for the no-show. His prophecy was solid, the trouble was his flock hadn’t been righteous enough. His poor flock, some of whom were so convinced that they’d maxed out their credit cards and declared bankruptcy. But when I spoke to these people for my book about Mormon polygamy, not one of them left Harmston’s cult as a result. Instead, they took it as a sign to pray harder, tithe more, and devote themselves more fully to their one true prophet of God.

It’s been fun watching MAGA melt down over Trump’s about-turn on the Epstein files, this past week. So many choice moments. Alex Jones weeping in his car. Laura Loomer calling for Pam Bondi to resign. Tucker Carlson talking about a cover-up. And Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, going on a wonderful tear—check it out, if only for the odd experience of nodding in agreement with an avowed Nazi. “Fuck you,” he says, addressing the President. “You’re fat, you’re stupid, you’re not funny. You’re not as smart as you think you are… We’re going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in America history. The liberals were right. MAGA supporters were had.”

My favorite face-eating-leopard clip though is the comedian Andrew Schulz who admits on his podcast, “So, we’re stupid. We’re the fucking idiots.” His brand as a shrewd social commentator has taken quite a knock given that his principle complaint is that Trump, the lyingest liar in Bullshit City, didn’t keep his word. Now, to save face, he’s pretending he’s just now finding out that Trump and Epstein were besties for 15 years. Oh well, if I’d known all that… Still, he gets points for admitting he was wrong.

Schulz isn’t a True Believer in the Eric Hoffer sense. He and his bro-podcasters went MAGA for edgelord reasons, they thought it was punk rock. It’s much harder for the molten core of the Trump cult, the frothing congregants of Q Anon who view Trump as not just a politician but as a Messianic warrior against evil who is destined to expose the global Satanic pedo-elite which controls the world and drinks the blood of children etc. They believe that Trump will bring about a mighty reckoning known as The Storm, which would in turn usher in The Great Awakening, a new dawn for mankind. So for Trump to suddenly say there’s no there there—no list, no one to prosecute, nothing to see, moving on…—is more than just a sad trombone, or a mere political flip flop. It’s a spiritual crisis.

Q Anon is much bigger than one might think, and its ideas are widely held. According to a 2023 poll by PRRI, the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, 22% of the American public believe that a “storm” is coming, and 16% believe that a pedophile cabal actually runs the world. One in six! And maybe they’re nuts, sure. But one can understand where it comes from. Because there have been a lot of sex crime conspiracies among the elites. The whole Savile business in the UK, Harvey Weinstein, Diddy. Even if you don’t go full cabal, there is something deeply strange about the Epstein saga, a former schoolteacher who ended up with a trafficking empire, an island, and the entire ruling class in his rolodex. That sweetheart deal he got in Florida, a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, from Alex Acosta, a man who Trump appointed as his Labor secretary in charge of human trafficking. And now the list is private, the names protected, no one is going to be prosecuted, while the State Department, just last week, guts its human trafficking division…

Q Anon may be the molten heart of this outrage, but MAGA is powered by its heat. Epstein isn’t some ancillary side-project for the Trump base, it’s central.

The Double Down

In a perfect world, MAGA would, like Schulz, admit en masse that they were stupid to believe a scumbag like Trump about anything, much less his pedophile friends. But instead, like the polygamists of Manti, they’re doubling down. We’re seeing tortured rationalization. Pretzel logic. An epic display of cognitive dissonance.

Here’s some of the rationales in Q-world, paraphrased:

1) “This just proves that the Deep State is more entrenched than we first thought.”

2) “Trump’s not releasing the files now because it’s not the right time. He’s being strategic. 5-D chess.”

3) “All those incriminating photos and videos of Trump and Epstein, they just prove that he was an undercover investigator for all those years, getting close to them so that one day he would blow it all open.”

It’s textbook Cognitive Dissonance, a phenomenon first coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, to refer to the psychological discomfort that rises when beliefs contradict the facts. Rather than change our beliefs—or simply live with that discomfort of holding two opposing thoughts in mind at once, which was for Keats a sign of intelligence, he called it “negative capability”—we often reshape and distort the facts in order to reduce that discomfort and keep our beliefs intact.

1. Effort Justification

One of the principles is Effort Justification—the idea that the more someone sacrifices or suffers for their beliefs, the more attached to them they become. MAGA’s faithful have alienated friends and family members, some were arrested at Jan 6, all of which galvanizes their conviction.

2. Belief Fusion

Another principle of Cognitive Dissonance, is the way that our beliefs become fused with our identity, so to abandon them is akin to self-annihilation. Instead, we justify. The dissonance between the facts and our beliefs becomes the “engine that drives self-justification”, as per the book Mistakes Were Made (Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

3. Social Reinforcement

But perhaps one of the most important factors in cognitive dissonance is the social aspect. Cults are communities, little societies unto themselves. The Manti polygamists were a secretive church in a small town, home-schooled and insular, self-reinforcing in every way. Q Anon is sprawling and online, but in other ways similar. Its world view is shared and confirmed within their own ranks, where critical relationships are forged around their sense of mission. To some degree every political movement is cult-like—the woke left certainly had a strong religious framework—but with MAGA it’s overt. Trump is a literal Christ figure.

4. Purpose Over Truth

People want something to live for, more so than the truth. This is a core lesson of cult dynamics. In The Brothers Karamazov, when Jesus returns and performs miracles in the streets, he is quickly arrested, and the Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell. He explains that the Church no longer needs Him because they have replaced truth with authority. That’s what people want in the end - not truth but comfort, answers, someone to obey. “The mystery of man’s being,” he says, “is not only to live but to have something to live for.”

The MAGA movement provides that purpose and identity. For all its seething resentments and rage, it sees its mission as righteous, so they excuse the lies of Dear Leader. They are content to remain within their echo-system, comforted by their narratives. To leave that bubble now would be unbearable. Not just the shame of admitting that they’d been fools and suckers, much less pedo-enabling destroyers of worlds, but where else will they find such purpose and meaning? They will need to reconstruct their identities once more.

Better to believe the lie than face the void.

A Time For Apostates

Prophet Harmston may not have lost any followers on March 26^th 2000. But his empire crumbled eventually, and that failed prophecy helped in his demise. I remember a woman there named Angie, one of Harmston’s youngest wives. She was a true believer, she’d been born into the cult. But as we spoke over weeks and months, her doubts emerged, because all cult members have them, tucked safely behind those fierce defensive shells. Bit by bit, she felt more emboldened to express them until eventually she escaped with her children. It was one of the death blows to Harmston’s church.

Every cult has its exiles and apostates. Among the polygamists they were the sister wives who fled in the night and the so-called Lost Boys. But MAGA has them too. For all the maddening dissonance we see in public, we can be reassured that, for some, behind their chitinous shells of self-justification, their conviction is being eaten away by betrayals like this.

This is the tiger that Trump has ridden from day one, the primal passions of nationalism and rage and religious fervor. It never ends well for those guys. Mussolini was hung upside down for his betrayals. There are many such cases. And betrayal is a powerful motivator. More so when there are child victims, whom you have arguably set out to rescue. Of all the betrayals so far—from vaccines to the pardoning of insurrectionists, to war in Iran and the plundering of national parks—Epstein is the most inflammatory.

One can’t help but wonder, as Epstein and Trump’s friendship returns to the center of the conversation, whether somewhere, in his gun-addled flock, a stray follower of Q will ask himself whether the greatest villain in the international Satanic pedo-cabal might actually be Trump himself…