“But the conjecture around Mr. Epstein’s crimes and death is a many-layered mania that can’t really be compared to anything else. The shadowy concepts that undergird the whole thing go to the “very foundation of MAGA,” as Ms. (Natalie) Winters put it, because, in her view and the view of people like her, “it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country.”
She summed up the movement’s sense of betrayal this way: “I just think it’s frankly very grifty to have spent your entire career promoting, even if it weren’t the Epstein thing directly, but the idea that there is this deep state, the idea that there’s this unelected class of, you know, bankers, corporation, countries, intel agencies, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar — and I don’t believe that — or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.” -The New York Times