Obviously, these people have a completely irreconcilable goals for what they *want*, but when it comes to porn, it's easy for them to agree on what they *don't* want.

That's fine when you're waging the campaign *against* something, but if you happen to win that campaign, you're in trouble. That's when the fight starts over who will get their way. That's the moment when winning coalitions become bitterly divided:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how…

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Now, some of these conflicts matter more than others. The least politically connected, least sophisticated (and most numerous) members of the conservative coalition have long been mollified by performative acts of cruel racism and gender discrimination.

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These could be enacted without any real impact on the power-players in the coalition, since they were insulated from discriminatory lending and hiring, immune to police violence, and could skip to another state or country to get abortion care, hire sex workers, etc. No one is ever going to deny Peter Thiel a mortgage, no matter how many twinks he bangs. Ted Cruz's daughter will always be able to get an abortion, no matter what Texas or federal law states.

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Clarence Thomas doesn't have to worry about getting pulled over because he "fits the description." As Wilhoit's Law says:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Project 2025 is an anthology, edited by the Heritage Foundation, collecting the post-victory aspirations of the most important members of the Trump coalition.

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As anthologists, Heritage's job was to choose which submissions to include and which ones to reject. Perlstein's key insight is that wherever Heritage included two or more directly contradictory plans in Project 2025, we can infer the groups that submitted those plans are each too powerful and important to sideline - they are equally matched combatants, and it's impossible to predict which one will get their way and which ones will eat shit in the aftermath of a victory.

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There were *so many* contradictions in Project 2025: immigration policy, military policy, trade policy, monetary policy, tax policy, and more. As Perlstein pointed out, Project 2025 was a 900-page roadmap to the future fracture lines in the Trump coalition. These were the places where the opposition could break off parts of Trump's base, in the same way that Steve Bannon has been doing to the progressive movement (also an easily fractured coalition).

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Since Trump won the presidency, House and Senate, he has done a remarkable job of keeping this brittle coalition together through a mix of flattery and bullying. But the fact remains that Trump's most important factions *hate* each other and are gunning for one another, and whenever Trump chooses one faction to win and another to lose, the losers are prone to turning on *him*:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-…

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Trump's lifelong strategy has been to race across a succession of rivers on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. He is the undisputed all-time historical champion of this bizarre sport, but no one can win that race forever, and your first loss is a career-ender.

I think a lot of people - including Trump allies - understand this, at least at a gut level. That's why the Epstein stuff is so huge now.

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It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the Trump base is organized around conspiratorial beliefs about elite pedophile rings:

soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/…

These beliefs are a stand-in for an overall rage against elite impunity, the two-tiered system of justice that lets the powerful get away with anything. The sexual abuse of children is such a viscerally offensive crime, so the idea that rich and powerful people are getting away with it carries a lethal charge.

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The Great Epstein Backstab (E332)

Many Trump voters were under the naive impression that his administration would release information about Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators in his child trafficking operation. So it came as a shock wh

^SoundCloud

Conspiracy fantasies have their roots in traumatic reality. Without a long list of US military cover-ups, there'd be no room for UFO conspiracies. The credibility of antivax ("pharma companies want to kill you and regulators want to help them") is rooted FDA's failure to prevent the opioid crisis, and the million Americans who died as a result:

memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21…

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Conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals. That's why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools" - it's what you get when you blame Jewish bankers, rather than the finance sector's class warfare, for your problems:

pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/bla…

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Conspiratorialists have the right feeling, but the wrong facts. If you hate elite impunity, you should be furious about the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have "absolute immunity" from prosecution for the crimes they commit in office. But bad actors can exploit the failures of the conspiratorial mindset to make people who are legitimately enraged by elite impunity to direct that rage at imaginary "cultural Marxists" at universities.

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As Naomi Klein writes in *Doppelganger*, the right lives in a "mirror world" where child abuse is confined to largely imaginary children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, while actual kids in Florida concentration camps, or border detention cages, or meat-packing plant night shifts, or living in hunger and without a home, are ignored:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not…

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It's not hard to understand why Trump wants to suppress the Epstein files. He had a long friendship with Epstein, and spoke glowingly of Epstein's taste in "beautiful women...on the younger side." Trump sent Epstein lewd drawings and imaginary dialogues about Epstein's "wonderful secret":

archive.is/20250718003039/wsj.…

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Not only that, it's likely that many of Trump's most important supporters were directly complicit in Epstein's crimes (participating in the rape of young women and girls) and indirectly complicit (covering up these crimes and helping to launder Epstein's money).

Can Trump convince the conspiratorial wing of his coalition that Epstein is a "nothingburger" and a fabrication of Biden, Obama, the Clintons, Emmanuel Goldstein and Snowball?

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It's not impossible. As *The American Prospect*'s Ryan Cooper points out, conspiratorialists possess an incredible ability to "believe just about anything, even if it literally kills them—witness, for instance, the unvaccinated Texas GOP official who was posting anti-vaccine memes on Facebook right up until he died of COVID":

prospect.org/politics/2025-07-…

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Epstein Signals the End of Donald Trump’s Crackerjack Crisis Management Style

For a decade, his chump fan base automatically believed his lies—until now.

^{Ryan Cooper (The American Prospect)}

As ever, *The Onion* captures the spirit of the moment with a single, brilliant headline, "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions":

theonion.com/elderly-woman-kee…

But so far, the signs are not looking good for Trump. Writing for *Wired*, Jake Lahut speaks to many high-ranking Trump advisors, past and present, anonymous and named, who are concerned about the mounting fury from Trump's conspiratorial base:

wired.com/story/trump-epstein-…

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Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions

LEXINGTON, KY—Stressing the importance of regularly performing mental gymnastics to prevent cognitive decline, local 80-year-old Edna Connolly confirmed Thursday that she keeps her mind active by justifying President Donald Trump’s actions.

^{The Onion Staff (The Onion)}

As Lahut writes, Trump is flubbing this badly, but there may be *no way* for him to resolve the Epstein affair to the satisfaction of his base. They were already primed to be suspicious of whatever story they were presented with, and this latest incident all but guarantees that they will not accept whatever material Trump is eventually arm-twisted into releasing.

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And that's not even the biggest disappointment Trump's conspiratorialists will confront. Trump has no intention of changing the system to make life better for this Christmas-voting turkeys. Arresting 11 million immigrants and any number of US citizens who fit the description will not help these people with their very real, material problem.

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Nor will banning abortion, giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, or defunding the police at the CFPB who were in charge of shutting down rip-off artists at payday lenders, big banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. So these people can only ever get angrier.

But the conspiratorial base isn't the only Trumpland faction that is being forced to eat shit after Trump's victory.

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In another *Wired* story, David Gilbert presents a snapshot of the pieces of the Trump coalition that have broken off, or are hanging by a thread:

wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstei…

There's Tucker Carlson, who thinks (correctly) that Trump is a warmongering lunatic for bombing Iran:

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…

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Tucker Carlson confronts Ted Cruz on Iran as Maga rift erupts into public view

Public spat reflects fracture among Trump’s coalition over whether US should join Israel’s escalating conflict with Iran

^{Joseph Gedeon (The Guardian)}

There's Laura Loomer, who thinks (correctly) that it's unforgivably corrupt for Trump to accept a luxury plane from Qatar:

politico.com/news/2025/05/12/t…

There's Ben Shapiro, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's tariffs are economic suicide:

mediamatters.org/tariffs-trade…

There's Joe Rogan, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's immigration raids are unforgivably cruel:

youtube.com/watch?v=WfmrEa0L08…

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Joe Rogan Experience #2344 - Amjad Masad

Amjad Masad is the founder and CEO of Replit, a cloud-based coding platform. He is also an outspoken voice on cultural and educational shifts in technology.⁠...

^YouTube

And there's Elon Musk, who is (correctly) furious that Trump wiped his ass with his promise of a balanced budget so he could hand trillions to the richest people in the history of the human race:

wired.com/story/elon-musk-thir…

Each of these people is an avatar for a bloc in the Trump coalition, and they reflect the fury of the people who stand behind them.

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This is as Rich Perlstein prophesied a year ago: these groups hate each other and the only way for some of them to get what they want is for others to be totally betrayed.

Trump has been racing over those alligator-backs for so long now, it can sometimes feel like he'll never miss a step. But he's one snap away from losing a leg, and after that, it'll be a bloodbath.

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