How the Epstein scandal could dethrone Trump.
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Are you surprised that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has exploded again with such force that it might actually blow the entire MAGA coalition into apoplectic shards? Are you stunned that this entire MAGA civil war was launched by a single Elon Musk tweet? Let’s explore how and why this is happening.
I always assumed that the MAGA world — including its various influencers (a motley crew of dark-triad personalities, tech oligarchs, neo-Nazi racists, and white Christian nationalists) — knew Donald Trump was lying through his teeth about his relationship with Epstein, and that the “Epstein files” (whatever that actually means) would never be released. Yet the declaration by the White House that there was no “Epstein list” and that the case was closed has set off a massive firestorm. The scandal threatens to permanently fracture Trump’s base.
Part of the ongoing fascination with the Epstein case derives, I suspect, from its murkiness and ambiguity. No new clarity ever seems to emerge, despite massive waves of media attention and public focus. The details remain funky. For instance: What was going on with Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner? Why did he give Epstein so much power and money (control over his fortune, estimated in the billions, plus his $77 million Park Avenue mansion)? Did Epstein blackmail or hypnotize Wexner in some way? Where did Epstein’s wealth come from?
How did the 21-year-old Epstein even get a job as a math teacher at Dalton — one of New York’s most prestigious private schools — without a college degree? Did he lie on his résumé? Was he just a talented confidence man from the beginning? What was this strange power he seemed to wield over so many?
I sense the Epstein story is not primarily about hardcore intelligence agencies seeking to blackmail the wealthy and powerful (although it seems very likely that Israeli intelligence lurks in the background), or the insidious working of dark money in any kind of precise or clockwork way. I suspect the story is more about the fuzzy psychodynamics found among members of the power elite.
Certain personality types and deviant psychologies attract each other and naturally mesh. Some quality in Epstein’s particular brand of sociopathy and dissociation exerted a magnetic pull on other similarly dissociated, vaguely sociopathic characters, ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates to Trump to Prince Andrew. All of them share an overarching belief in their own entitlement. For many of them, this includes exploring their erotic proclivities.
Unless I am missing something or more comes to light, Epstein’s sexual abuse, rape, and grooming of poor young girls to pass along to his buddies was, of course, utterly despicable, immoral, and illegal. Even so, it never reached anywhere near the Sadean depths practiced by the European network of child traffickers and ritual murderers as chronicled in Anneke Lucas’s memoir, Quest for Love, which I wrote about here: Look What You Made Me Do.
Until the 20th century, it was more or less accepted that old wealthy men would sexually exploit teenage girls. That doesn’t make it right, of course. It is awful. But unless there is far more to the story, this was nothing compared to what went on in England with Jimmy Saville and in Belgium, as Lucas chronicles.
Of course, we still don’t know what was done in that bizarre, gold-domed, Byzantine temple on Epstein’s island. We don’t know what is in those tens of thousands of hours of video that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned (unless she was also lying about that, which is quite possible, if utterly confusing). There was also Jean-Luc Brunel, founder of modeling agencies and Epstein procurer, who died in a French prison under suspicious circumstances identical to Epstein’s “suicide.”
According to QAnon myth and MAGA rhetoric, the sexual abuse of children was meant to be the thing that vile Democrats and WEF (World Economic Forum) Wall Street bankers did: This was the ultimate evil underlying every other form of corruption and rot. If it turns out Trump is no different from other power players in covering up this dark truth, the entire ideology — the symbolic architecture — of the MAGA movement collapses. There is no other value they support, except punitive cruelty against the poor and immigrants, or “border security.”
Ironically, the movement doesn’t care about other abused children at all. For instance, here is a video of handcuffed children captured by faceless ICE agents in Los Angeles, separated from their families, with no explanation or information about where they are being taken:
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So I had assumed the brainwashed MAGA cult and its influencers understood that it was all bullshit — after all, QAnon is an obvious fraud, Trump is a grifter and inveterate liar. Epstein was Trump’s best friend for a decade. We already know from criminal investigations that Mar-a-Lago was used to sex traffic young girls to Epstein, who lived down the street. I never imagined the Epstein files would be revealed.
However, I now see there is a deeper layer that I was missing: a symbolic order props up the MAGA movement, and this is not easy to escape. Deeper analysis provides some hope (although I don’t want to get us too excited yet!) that the Epstein scandal will, in fact, critically wound the MAGA cult and, eventually, take down the Fascist Right.
To understand why, we first need to explore some ideas from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan around fetishism, patriarchal authority, and disavowal that can give us surprising insight into this situation. Also, I believe this analysis reveals what Musk is trying to do, instinctively, as he goes after Trump.
The Fetish, Nom Du Pere, and Trumpian Jouissance
Trump supporters — or the broader MAGA movement — operate not just as a political bloc. They also must hold a symbolic structure or order together. The cult works by investing the followers’ libidinal drives into a deep identification with their leader. The MAGA worldview constitutes a constricted psychic economy built upon a fantasy — Lacan uses the word jouissance (perverse enjoyment) for the kind of dark pleasure experienced by Trump’s followers. “Trump” functions as the master-signifier — the fetish object — that anchors their sense of self and world.
According to Lacanian theory, contradictions are not errors to be corrected: They are essential features that support the fantasy. The MAGA cultist doesn’t simply repress the contradictions — they enjoy the dissonance produced by them. The contradictions provide an effective, energetic charge. This is why Trump supporters simultaneously believe Trump can be a billionaire magnate and a voice for the forgotten; a Christ-like, redemptive hero, as well as a man of vulgar excess. These are not glitches — the frisson of the contradictions are structural features intensifying the fantasy they maintain.
The White House social media represents Lacan’s point perfectly: They stoke the fantasy and libidinal investment of his followers with posts such as one proclaiming Trump as Superman protecting truth and justice. But this is done in an ironic, over-the-top way fitting Lacan’s notion of disavowal: “je sais bien, mais quand même…” (“I know very well, but all the same…”)
Fantasy functions as a screen, organizing the subject’s desire in relation to what Lacan called “the Real”: the traumatic core of social antagonism that cannot be symbolized (class warfare, racial resentment, sexual anxiety, etc.) and therefore must be suppressed.
From a Lacanian viewpoint, Trump is the phallic principle or master signifier who promises to protect his devotees from the chaos of the Real (so they don’t have to confront their castration anxiety in a social and psychological sense). Hence his popular slogan: “I alone can fix it.”
Lacan draws a distinction between knowledge and belief. Someone might know Trump has lied or acts in ways that contradict what he says, but they do not believe it in their unconscious depths.
Despite and because of the contradictions, Trump’s followers continue to invest in the symbolic structure because, at this point, their libidinal economy depends on it.
In this way, the MAGA cult positions Trump as a kind of father figure in the Lacanian sense: not an actual father, but the one who gives structure to the symbolic order. Lacan calls this the “Name-of-the-Father.” In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Name of the Father (Nom du Père) is a central concept: It marks the entry of the subject into the symbolic order — language, law, and social structure. It originates in Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s Oedipus complex, where the child’s early desire for the mother must be interrupted or “castrated” by the paternal function. This interruption is not necessarily the literal father, but a symbolic operation: the imposition of a prohibition that redirects desire and anchors the child within the shared universe of language and culture.
Trump acts out his followers’ fantasy of a mythic return to order, power, and potency — a symbolic remembering. His contradictions are absorbed, even embraced, as signs of his authenticity — including his transgressions of social propriety, his insults, and his vicious attacks on his enemies.
For the lower classes, the MAGA movement is obviously not about rational self-interest (in fact, Trump’s policies will be disastrous, even fatal, for many of his followers). It’s about enjoyment: luxuriating in a dark, masochistic form of pleasure.
Lacan’s concept of jouissance helps us see why humiliation (of liberals, elites, or even of the followers themselves) is part of Trump’s appeal. Trumpism enables a shared enjoyment in transgression, cruelty, and societal breakdown. This is why scandals often reinforce his supporters’ fervor: They intensify the pleasure of identifying with him through all the contradictions.
The Epstein revelations pose a threat because they point to an internal contradiction that cannot be disavowed or suppressed. If Trump, instead of being a misunderstood outsider, is really implicated and, in fact, belongs to the same elite pedophilic network that MAGA has defined itself against — that may fracture their fantasy in a way that can’t be escaped or repressed.
This kind of fracture could bring the subject too close to the Real: the traumatic core that the fantasy was constructed to avoid. In Lacanian terms, this could trigger a breakdown of the symbolic order: a psychotic foreclosure, a collective dis-identification. If the “Name-of-the-Father” is stripped of authority, this exposes the subject to a form of symbolic castration: a loss of coherence and faith in the ideological structure that holds his or her fragile world together.
To understand the role Trump plays in the MAGA psyche, we have to move beyond normal categories of political analysis. Of course he is a demagogue, a liar, and a narcissist. Those labels are true, but they don’t get at the psychic core of his appeal. In psychoanalytic terms, Trump is something far more structurally important. He functions as both fetish object and master-signifier. His presence organizes desire and belief. He resolves — or at least covers over — the otherwise unbearable contradictions haunting the inner, psychic lives of his followers.
In Freud’s theory of fetishism, the fetish emerges as a defense against traumatic knowledge — originally, for Freud, the boy’s realization that the mother lacks a penis. Freud believed this insight threatened the boy’s sense of his own integrity. To preserve psychic wholeness, the subject splits: He both accepts and denies the truth. The fetish object (a shoe, a piece of hair, a certain gesture) becomes the stand-in for what has been lost. “The horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the fetish,” Freud wrote. The fetish substitutes for the maternal phallus the little boy once believed in and does not want to release.
Trump becomes a fetish-object in the Freudian sense because he covers over the lack that animates the MAGA worldview: the lost authority of the white patriarch, the collapse of American exceptionalism, the humiliation of globalization, cultural liberalism, and their own economic dispossession — a kind of totalizing, social/psychological form of castration anxiety. Trump can’t resolve these anxieties, but he masks them. His transgressive, obscene image stands in for the power that his followers don’t want to admit they have lost forever (America will be “great again”).
At the same time, Trump plays the role of what Lacan calls the “master-signifier” — a signifier that doesn’t refer to a particular concept but rather to an empty center that anchors the subject’s entire symbolic universe. He ties together disparate and even contradictory threads — evangelical Christianity and casino vulgarity, blue-collar resentment and billionaire indulgence, victimhood and messianism — under one unifying construct.
What the Epstein case threatens is not just Trump’s reputation but his structural position as both fetish and master-signifier. If the suppressed truth — that he was part of the elite sexual-political-pedo “game” from the start — pierces the screen, the entire economy of the fantasy collapses. MAGA can no longer hide or cover over the lack, because they embody it. The fetish object of cultic belief becomes contaminated with the Real: It must be discarded.
Lacanian theory can’t predict MAGA’s future behavior, but it helps us think structurally. If the fantasy collapses, the disillusionment could turn inward (depression, apathy) or outward (new forms of reactionary aggression). The desire for coherence might reconfigure around even darker conspiracies as a way to re-stabilize jouissance, despite facing disintegration. Or the MAGA cult may seek a new fetish object, master-signifier, or “Name-of-the-Father.” In practical terms, this would mean pivoting to a new leader, like RFK Jr. or Elon Musk.
In fact, it was Musk’s post on X/Twitter that launched this crisis in MAGA’s symbolic order. When Musk said Trump was on Epstein’s list, he forced MAGA to demand to know why the list had not been released. This forced the White House to take a stand and reject the very existence of the Epstein file, and try to close the case altogether — even though releasing all of the Epstein material was one of the main promises all of the MAGA influencers made to their followers, over and over, and over, again.
One interpretation is that Musk and Trump have entered into a serious power struggle. Musk actually has a great deal of control over most MAGA influencers through his platform X (formerly Twitter), since he can demonetize or promote them at will. In a way, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and so on, are vassals in Musk’s media empire — like employees or data serfs working the fields of their technofeudal overlord. They owe him fealty, perhaps more than the loyalty they owe to Trump.
We now know that Musk isn’t as likable or intellectually smart as he once seemed. Years of shitposts have revealed Musk’s political proclivities, his love of neo-Nazi and antisemitic content, and his willingness to lie brazenly. But we also know that Musk is a genius at winning power struggles, with an instinctive (not intellectual) power drive. Musk has managed to maintain his position as CEO at several huge corporations, overcoming any opposition, while he Tweets a hundreds times a day, pretends to be amazing at video games, and runs other fascistic political operations.
I suspect that what we are witnessing now is just the beginning of a battle for control of the Right — and the country as a whole —between Musk and Trump. Musk’s tweet attack was just the first, strategically brilliant salvo. I don’t think anyone can say what will follow, or who will win.
A version of this piece was originally published in “Daniel Pinchbeck’s newsletter.”
