The MAGA power struggle has quietly begun

The Donald Trump Death Watch from last week has died down a little, though I expect it will keep on flaring up every time he displays his bruised hands or has another health-related incident that raises these same questions all over again. But it made me realize that the people around him have to be thinking about life after Trump — and whether it will be their turn to rise. 

As I argued yesterday, I think Stephen Miller may be measuring the White House drapes. I agree with readers who think he hasn’t got a snowball’s chance, but ambition-monsters like Miller often overestimate their odds. More to the point, he’s just one of the many people around Trump who are beginning to think their time is coming. It’s a trend worth watching, to see how these MAGA folks position themselves to seize the moment if and when Trump finally dies or retires.

Trump’s love poem to Epstein is worse than you thought

Trump’s efforts to make the Jeffrey Epstein controversy go away have been hamfisted and inept, even by his standards. Such as when he yelled “fake” at the Wall Street Journal and then sued the paper for reporting that he had celebrated his pedophile friend’s birthday with a card that “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” He must have known that the Journal had a copy of it, which the newspaper affirmed yesterday by publishing a facsimile.

Somehow, it’s even worse than I pictured it. I was assuming a cartoonish Playboy-bunny model, because that fits more with the image of himself Trump likes to project. The drawing, however, looks more like a stylized teenage girl. Which I suppose makes sense, since Trump literally wrote, “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.”

Last week, a group of Epstein’s victims spoke out about releasing the Justice Department’s case files. They hinted that they’d been abused by multiple men, but declined to say who, out of fear of being targeted for lawsuits or violence. One said she didn’t want to “send a direct message” to Trump, because she’s “scared enough.”

On Monday, an appeals court upheld the $83 million civil judgment in journalist E. Jean Carroll’s suit against Trump, another legal affirmation that Carroll told the truth about Trump sexually assaulting her in the ‘90s. She’s just one of more than two dozen women with similar stories, and yet Trump voters just keep pretending he’s some champion of women. It’s a wonder the cognitive dissonance doesn’t break their brains completely. Then again, if you talk to Fox News viewers, it’s easy to conclude their minds have turned to total mush.

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“Apocalypse Now” was not a romcom

Of course, when not pretending that Trump is the savior of girls and women, MAGA also loves to celebrate what a massive asshole he is. On Saturday, he posted a stupid-looking AI-generated image of himself as Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now,” with the caption, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.”

What’s telling here is that Trump is openly identifying as the villain. Duvall’s character in that movie is the face of irrational, racist violence. We’re just a couple of meme cycles away from Trump posting AI pictures of himself as a KKK member or some other cartoonishly evil bad guy. It works for him, honestly. For one thing, it makes it harder for liberals to call him out as a racist monster. He’s proud of it! And he was elected anyway. It’s like trying to tell people that fire is dangerous while they’re eagerly pouring gasoline on their house.

But Trump’s dumb superpower is that he gets to have it both ways. Somehow he claims to be both the bad guy and the hero, and his supporters are fine with that. So when a reporter asked him about the post, he called it “fake news” and played the victim. “Be quiet, listen! You don’t listen! You never listen,” he whined.

It’s not fake news: He literally posted that meme himself on Truth Social. But his tantrum does remind me of many of the people I’ve known in my life who became Trump voters. These were folks who used racial slurs, but would flip out if you said they were racist. Or they’d claim to be chivalrous gentlemen, in between bouts of ass-grabbing and rape jokes. Or they’d preach about personal responsibility, while refusing to ever be held accountable for their own behavior. No wonder Trump makes sense to them.

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What we're reading this week

• “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” Ezra Klein, New York Times

• “The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another,” Charlie Warzel, Atlantic

• “Call Me Crazy, but I for One Still Want to Know if the President Committed Depraved Sex Crimes,” Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate

• “Wanting a Child at the End of the World,” Sarah Jones, New York

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