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Maureen Dowd today:

MAGA’s new target: Donald Trump!

People often become what they scorn. Donald Trump has become the deep state.

He is the keeper of the secrets. He is the one stealing away people’s liberties. He is the one weaponizing government and protecting the ruling class.

With ICE and DOGE, Trump deputized wolf packs to root around in Americans’ personal information. He got Republicans to give Stephen Miller his own army. Trump manipulates government to hurt his perceived enemies. He obscures rather than reveals, pushing aside reporters who ask penetrating questions in favor of Pravda-like partisans who take his side.

Trump’s supporters thought he would shed light on shady elites protecting their own money and power. Now MAGA is reckoning with the fact that Trump is the shady elite, shielding information about Jeffrey Epstein.

“So the guy who spent his lifetime saying the deep state hides things from you and represses you is now saying ‘We’ve got nothing to hide, trust me,’” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And the people who follow him don’t. They think he’s just as bad as the people he criticized before he became president.”

It’s mythic, being devoured by the forces you unleashed. Trump has trafficked in conspiracy theories since the despicable “birther” one about Barack Obama. Now that whirlpool of dark innuendo has sucked him down. He can no longer control the Epstein conspiracy madness inflamed by his top officials.

Trump always reminded me of Lonesome Rhodes, the charismatic, populist entertainer whose “candid” patter with plain folks garners him enormous power in Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie “A Face in the Crowd.”

At the finale, Andy Griffith’s Rhodes — engorged by flattery and riches — has a narcissistic explosion. Not realizing the woman he betrayed flipped on his microphone, he calls his loyal fans “morons,” “miserable slobs” and “trained seals.”

“I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to ’em for caviar,” he crows, grinning.

Trump’s Truth Social posts backing up Pam Bondi’s claim that the Epstein files were much ado about nothing showed that same brutal disregard for his devout fans. They had taken him seriously? What fools!

He tried to subdue his MAGAcolytes — his “boys” and “gals” — by ordering them not to “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” He said that those who are focused on the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax” are “selfish people,” “PAST supporters” and “weaklings” who had been “conned by the Lunatic Left.”

If his fans couldn’t focus on how great he was, better than “perhaps any President in our Country’s history,” Trump pouted in a post, “I don’t want their support anymore!”

One “gal,” a Texan named Rosie, said she was brokenhearted. She replied on Truth Social that she has four daughters and “can’t even begin to comprehend the flipped narrative that ‘it was so long ago’ ‘why are we still talking about this’ and ‘nobody should care.’ These victims were some ones daughters, sisters, nieces, granddaughter. Someone’s child. Please reconsider, sir.”

He’s lost some of his base’s trust by refusing to deliver the goods, or to acknowledge that he used people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to whip up the frenzy against the pedophile who gave rides to Trump and Bill Clinton on his plane dubbed by some the Lolita Express.

Trump bonded with Epstein years ago, although it’s not clear if Trump knew the extent of Epstein’s predations. He told New York magazine in 2002 that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

This week was the first time Trump had such a dramatic rift with his supporters, who are often compared to a cult.

Trump, who rose to power with the help of Fox News, threatened Emma Tucker, the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, trying to stop its storyabout a bawdy letter and drawing he allegedly contributed to a 50th birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein.
“I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,” he said in a call Tuesday with The Journal. (He filed the suit on Friday.) He denied that he ever drew an outline of a naked woman with his name scribbled in a salacious spot, along with writing an insinuating wish to Epstein that “every day be another wonderful secret.” (What had to be kept secret, Donald?)

“I don’t draw pictures,” he wrote on Truth Social, denouncing the “FAKE letter” in the “Fake Story.”

But Trump’s lies — like the one about his uncle at M.I.T. and the Unabomber — are falling apart almost instantaneously. It immediately came out that he was a “high-profile doodler,” as Tyler Pager put it in The Times, and that he donated drawings to charity in the early 2000s.
On Thursday, Trump posted that he had asked Bondi to produce “any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval.” But judges usually keep such testimony secret. It was hilarious to see Trump hiding behind the judiciary he’s tried to sideline.

The president, hoping to redirect the ire of the base back to its favorite chew toy, the mainstream media, posted that The Journal is a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag.”

Natalie Winters, a reporter for Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, told Bannon that the Journal story made her feel “gaslit” by the administration. “I thought the D.O.J. had nothing related to Epstein,” she said. “Well, this story sort of contradicts that. So why don’t we release it? It’s maddening.”

Twisting conspiracy theories into a Gordian knot of hate, Trump is claiming some Epstein files were “made up” by Barack Obama, James Comey, “Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration” and “Crooked Hillary.”

It’s tough to blame the deep state when you are the deep state.