Over the past several weeks, a major controversy has erupted over Donald Trump’s ties to the convicted sex trafficker and millionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein. Before Epstein’s conviction on two counts of procuring a child for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution in 2008 and the 13 months in jail he served for that, Epstein had risen to a certain prominence in the same Florida and New York circles that Trump traveled in. The two had, in Trump’s own words, been friends for 15 years, and Trump has said that he ended the friendship over a real estate disagreement in 2004. In 2019 Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. Epstein was found hung to death in his cell several months later and was presumed to have committed suicide rather than go to trial. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Epstein Case and MAGA

The Epstein case has played an important role in the MAGA mindset. Many in MAGA fervently believe that there is a cult which includes top members of the Democratic Party and famous celebrities who sexually molest and traffic young women and children. Some go so far as to believe that these supposed cultists murder and drink the blood of young women and children in satanic rituals. Further, many believe that all this is interwoven with the so-called “deep state”—sections of the intelligence agencies and repressive apparatus—that are “really” in control.

There is no evidence for any such cult. But there is plenty of evidence throughout history of how belief in such cults serves the ruling class overall. This belief of many in MAGA echoes themes of classic “conspiracy theories” dating back a thousand years to the Crusades, in which European Christians waged “holy wars” against Muslims. The same slanderous myth of drinking the blood of young children was also used to justify the dispossession, forced exile and murder of Jews in Europe over the centuries, including in the Nazi extermination of six million. 

To be clear, the whole ruling class—Democratic and Republican alike—do control a system which exploits and oppresses 150 million children. These children toil as child laborers in places like the coltan mines of Congo, or the garment factories of Bangladesh, and other places in the “global south.” There is also a huge international capitalist industry in the forced prostitution (or “trafficking”) of women.¹ Further, misogyny and sexual abuse permeate every pore of society. But these monstrously criminal acts grow out of and are reinforced by the everyday functioning of the economic and political system of capitalism-imperialism, which is interwoven with brutal patriarchal domination of women and children that has marked every oppressive society for millennia. In other words, this is systemic and not some conspiracy cooked up by a few people.

The supposed existence of this “deep-state sex ring” today has been cynically encouraged and spread by prominent MAGA people like Steve Bannon and J.D. Vance, to name just two. Rumors have existed (and been stoked) within MAGA-world of an “Epstein client list” which would supposedly reveal the identities of those who were part of this alleged cult. 

Again, one complicating factor in this is that Trump himself was a very high-profile friend of Epstein’s for 15 years. While Trump has encouraged suspicion of the so-called “deep state” (that is, the FBI and other government bodies that launched investigations against him), Epstein per se has not been one of his core themes. 

Nonetheless, some prominent Trumpers—especially including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI head Kash Patel and Patel’s number two, Dan Bongino—did make a big deal out of the Epstein case and especially what they called Epstein’s “client list.” This list supposedly contains the names of prominent people to whom Epstein supposedly pimped out young women and girls. Bondi and the others promised to release it… until recently, when they all switched gears and stated that such a list did not actually exist. To be clear, nobody actually knows whether such a list exists or not, and relying on the statements of the known liars Bondi, Patel and Bongino—or anyone else in or around the Trump regime—is not a way to determine that. 

But the sudden reversal about the very existence of this list has infuriated a section of the MAGA forces. Trump told them to essentially get over it and focus on other parts of his agenda. A week-long controversy ensued in which some prominent MAGA leaders called on Trump to make Bondi release the list and in which Trump, in turn, then accused those opponents of being “weaklings,” among other things.

The controversy went to a whole higher level last Thursday night when the Wall Street Journal accused Trump of having sent a misogynist card for Epstein’s 50th birthday, complete with a semi-pornographic cartoon. Trump denied that he wrote and drew such a card. This in turn attracted even more attention from those generally opposed to Trump.

How, then, should people opposed to Trump and fascism understand and evaluate all this? 

First, MAGA is a fascist force moving at warp speed to impose a fascist transformation of U.S. society. In the view of those running MAGA, this is the only resolution to the extreme crisis that U.S. capitalism-imperialism now faces and is a life-and-death mission. Whatever Trump did or did not do 25 years ago cannot change this central and essential fact: Trump is a fascist, and he and his whole MAGA movement is illegitimate because it is fascist.

That has real meaning! Bob Avakian put it this way in a recent social media message:

Trump fascism is a regime that openly and aggressively strips away basic rights and blatantly declares that there is no rule of law and due process of law other than what it dictates, and that raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries.

It is a regime that is bent on unleashing unregulated and unfettered capitalist plunder, and in the pursuit of that takes a sledgehammer (or chainsaw) to crucial programs and services that people depend on—ruining livelihoods, wrecking science and health care, undermining and perverting education, and creating chaos that will cause huge numbers of people to suffer, here and all over the world.

A fascist regime like this requires someone like Donald Trump as its head: a pathological maniac, with his finger on the nuclear button, who appoints dangerous madmen and power-mad parasites to key positions of power. (From Revolution #114: Defeating Trump/MAGA fascism: Looking to some future elections... or working now to mobilize millions around this powerful unifying demand: The Trump fascist regime must go!)

There has been a long and unfortunate history of people looking for some easy way to get rid of Trump that tries to get around this essential fact about Trump, his political machine, and his supporters. Too often people have been fooled, or fooled themselves, into thinking that this time Trump’s gone too far and won’t get away with it—whether it’s the Hollywood Access “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, the Russia investigation, the first impeachment, the attempt to violently overturn the 2020 election, his mishandling of top secret government documents, his criminal indictments and even convictions—and time and again, people’s hopes have been dashed. Why? Because these fascists overall are on a mission to which Trump is essential, and any quarrel they might have with this or that element of what Trump represents will almost certainly not, in and of itself, derail them.

This losing approach has often been stoked and even initiated by the Democratic Party. The main leaders of the Democratic Party would rather point to Trump’s personal failings than confront and marshal opposition to the full fascist program of MAGA.

Why? To again cite Bob Avakian, from a different message:

Eliminating the underlying causes of this fascism is impossible within the confines of this system, and the Democratic Party’s highest priority is maintaining and enforcing this system. The heads of the Democratic Party will always seek to keep the struggle against this fascist regime within terms and limits that do not threaten the stability of this system. But, even short of a revolution to abolish this system overall, the necessary struggle to defeat and remove this fascist regime requires non-violent but determined and sustained struggle, of millions of people, to bring the functioning of this system, under the rule of the fascists, to a halt—to make the country “ungovernable” by this fascist regime—so that different factors and forces come together, as a big powerful broom sweeping this fascist regime from power. (from Revolution #119: Democratic Party politicians may contribute to the crucial struggle against Trump/MAGA fascism—but the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, lead this struggle where it needs to go.)

MAGA Will Not Self-Destruct—but Conflicts Within MAGA Can Play a Role IF THERE IS A POWERFUL MOVEMENT DETERMINED TO END TRUMP’S FASCIST RULE NOW

That does NOT mean that conflicts within MAGA could not play any role, or even an important role, in actually driving out this regime. On the contrary, if there were a situation of massive, day-after-day, nonviolent but militant resistance, contradictions within the Trump camp could become magnified, and a back-and-forth dynamic could set in where the deepening divisions and cracks within the regime encouraged more masses to come in the streets, and the greater mass upheaval could amplify the divisions. But, again, such a dynamic requires that massive and relentlessly ongoing nonviolent struggle aimed at driving out the regime be on a far higher and more sustained basis than it is now. There is no shortcut, no magic way out of this—but there IS a way out, as concretized in the program, stance and strategy of Refuse Fascism. People who burn to see this fascism defeated need to focus on that, joining, supporting and actively building Refuse Fascism.

Ask yourself: what if in the next weeks the movement against this fascism were able to achieve something along the lines of the outpouring of 2020 over the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? Let’s remember that thousands and eventually millions poured into the streets, night after night, from big cities to the smallest of small towns, demanding that police murder STOP. If a movement approaching that size, scope and determination were to be united around the single unifying demand that TRUMP MUST GO NOW!, internal conflicts that MAGA has in the past been able to withstand could, under the pressure of a major challenge, intensify, and contribute to significantly weakening the cohesion of the fascist forces. 

To draw once more from Bob Avakian, Revolution #125: Not the courts, and not the Democratic Party: Decent people, mobilizing massively and relentlessly, are the force that must be relied on to defeat Trump/MAGA fascism.: 

It is up to the decent people, in the millions and millions, to stop this Trump fascist juggernaut and the horrors it is moving to impose on people in this country and in the world as a whole.

Ongoing protests, and powerful mobilizations all over the country, have been very important, and they show the potential for what must be done. But all this must make a leap, soon, to become a massive popular uprising, determined to actually defeat this fascist regime, uniting around the urgent demand: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!

This means “no business as usual.” It means protest and resistance building day after day: non-violent but sustained and relentless—responding to repression by the fascist regime with even greater outpourings of resistance—uniting all who can be united, in continually growing numbers, motivated by the necessary sense of urgency, aiming to create a profound political crisis and major shifts and “realignments” throughout society, including in the dominant institutions of power, so that this illegitimate fascist regime cannot function, and is actually removed.