Cope-a-ca-MAGA

In the hottest club north of Havana, the MAGA cope is real.

Photos courtesy of The Guardian

It’s Schadenfriday and just 48 hours since Democrats dropped Epstein bombs on the GOP. So let’s enjoy some serious MAGA cope.

Before we dive in, a reminder that this is a crisis of MAGA’s own making. Many on the right spent years insisting that the Epstein files be released believing they contained the seeds of the Democrats’ destruction.

JD Vance once suggested there was a huge government conspiracy to keep the files from being released.

Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring? And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don’t talk about it.

He added,

If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself. What purpose do you even serve?

Don Jr. demanded that the Biden administration “show us all the Epstein client list now!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!!”

And FBI Director Kash Patel once made a living off complaining that the FBI was hiding the truth from the American public. He declared that Republicans, who controlled the House, needed to “put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

Welp. Now the clown shoe is on the other foot, Trump is spiraling, and Vance and others—well, let’s check in on them.

Trump’s “hoax” playbook isn’t landing

In the wake of the release of 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate, Donald Trump acted predictably. He labeled revelations that he spent hours with a victim at Epstein’s house and knew about Ghislaine Maxwell’s recruiting of girls from Mar-a-Lago as all part of a “Democratic hoax.”

That’s some hoax, to plant emails about Trump some 14 years ago while he was still a reality TV host, in the hopes they would come back later to bite him if he ever became President. What a time machine the Democrats have!

When reporters asked Trump what Epstein’s emails claimed, he refused to answer questions and walked out.

Say nothing, act natural

JD Vance is taking what many are calling the “Gerald Ford route” by remaining silent about the new revelations, even while journalists are taking his advice and asking questions about the Epstein files. Lawrence O’Donnell, who first made the comparison, explained to his viewers that Ford, like Vance, had “said nothing” when “things were the darkest for President Richard Nixon.”

This comparison sits quite uncomfortably with the VP, which means O’Donnell really nailed it. Vance responded defensively, pointing out in a reply to O’Donnell, “I did two media interviews literally today, one of which is airing in a few hours.”

But last night’s interview of Vance was by Fox’s Sean Hannity, who, to no one’s surprise, never questioned Vance about the damning Epstein emails. O’Donnell pointed this out to Vance. “Not a single question or answer about Epstein. Your silence continues. You are Gerald Ford tonight.”

In fairness, it’s a terribly unflattering comparison. Ford was a far more decent man than Vance.

Trump was an informant! Again!

While the White House walked out or clammed up, right wing podcasters launched narrative trial balloons to try to excuse the inexcusable. These deflated quickly.

Tim Pool floated the idea that Trump doesn’t want the Epstein files released because it could expose him as a government informant.

Pool said he felt this was a “strong possibility.” Never mind that the statement he cited was from Speaker Mike Johnson, made two months ago. Johnson had tossed out a wild and baseless claim that Trump was a government informant, then retracted it just days later because even he understood that it made absolutely no sense. Here was that moment, for the record.

And really, is this the tack the right wants to take? That Trump went to all those parties and was with all those underaged girls because he was [checks notes] there to snitch on Epstein?

This theory fails to understand that government informants are usually selected because they are deep in the middle of criminal activity, thus giving them credibility within the group secretly informed upon. And such informants are usually themselves guilty of whatever it is they are snitching on.

It will be humorous to watch Trump’s MAGA defenders try this theory on for size, only to get their asses handed to them the way Johnson did. The Speaker no doubt advanced this notion after hearing Trump himself say it aloud as he tried unsuccessfully to explain what the hell he was doing around Epstein all the time.

The Democrats killed her!

Podcaster Benny Johnson, who, like Pool, received cash from the Kremlin for delivering Russian talking points on his show, suggested to his listeners that Virginia Giuffre died not by suicide but at the hands of Democrats.

No really, that’s what he threw out to the base.

Johnson claimed the Democrats wanted to silence Giuffre because she consistently claimed Trump never touched her. And since, in Johnson’s expert opinion, that would undermine the narrative that Trump was part of a pedophile ring run by Epstein and Maxwell, the Democrats just had to get rid of her.

I’m still waiting for Johnson’s explanation of how the Democrats also killed Epstein in his prison cell after he was arrested and held under Trump’s watch. That should be a nice, equally twisted one.

It bears noting that many women who have accused Trump of sexual crimes and misconduct have issued contrary statements or recanted, either because of alleged threats or because of NDAs and settlement agreements. A woman who alleged Trump and Epstein raped her when she was 13 ultimately dropped her suit. Stormy Daniels made a public statement that nothing had happened between her and Trump, only to explain later that she felt compelled to say so due to an NDA.

So there may be other logical explanations, consistent with patterns we have seen with Trump, for why Giuffre would maintain Trump did not touch her, even if that was untrue. How we get from there to “the Democrats killed her” is something only a peer-reviewed, longitudinal study of the MAGA brain might one day explain.

They’re going with the Roy Moore defense

The copiest cope of all came from former Fox personality Megyn Kelly, who argued on her podcast that Epstein was not technically a pedophile since he wasn’t into five-year old girls, just “barely legal type” 15-year old girls.

No, she really said that.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and none of it good. I should first point out that age 15 is not “barely legal” in any part of the United States. The lowest age of consent, common across the South, is 16.

Second, notice how Kelly employed language that sanitizes and masks Epstein’s actual criminal behavior. She claimed Epstein was “into” these girls—not that he molested, assaulted and raped them.

When Kelly offered this justification, after picking my jaw up off the floor I had to go check something. And yup, I’d heard this exact defense before, back when former Alabama Gov. Roy Moore was running for Senate and reports of his behavior around teenage girls reemerged.

Here’s what Tully Borland of The Federalist published at the time:

I am going to argue for the very unpopular, even shocking, view that, even if Roy Moore did what he is accused of doing, Alabamans are within their rights to vote for him, and they shouldn’t let Democrats and Never Trumpers shame them into not voting.

Here is one thing we know and should admit from the start: in his early thirties, Moore had a penchant for dating teenagers. Apparently, this was not an uncommon occurrence during this time. In fact, this practice has a long history and is not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family.

Hoo boy.

Kelly is taking a lot of heat for this, and well she should. But the shift is quite telling. MAGA is reduced to arguing defenses like this precisely because they are running out of any better excuses for Trump. They can’t credibly claim the Epstein files are a hoax, especially after pushing for their release for years. They can’t claim Trump wasn’t buddies with Epstein, now that there’s evidence that Trump was with one of the victims for hours inside Epstein’s house. And they simply don’t know how much worse it’s going to get when even more files are released.

That means they have to start to argue that pedophilia of the Epstein and Trump variety is somehow okay. It was always going to drop down into this particular gutter.

That defense didn’t work for Moore and it won’t work for Trump. And as the walls continue to close in, Trump’s acolytes and mouthpieces are either shutting the hell up like JD Vance or digging themselves into deep holes like Pool, Johnson and Kelly.

It may not be long before these officials and influencers start to look out for themselves, test the political winds, and turn their backs. Indeed, Pool has already begun to do so, stating on his podcast,

“They want the narrative to be that Trump is a pedo. And I’m like, maybe, probably not. I mean, I feel like if they really had that evidence, they would’ve released it….”

[Narrator: If the current Justice Department has that evidence, they certainly would not willingly release it.]

Pool ultimately conceded,

“I think there’s a possibility. I don’t know if it’s a ten percent or a one percent….”

That’s one step up the probability ladder. Keep going, Tim! You might eventually reach the obvious.