I keep doing a double take when I see the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on CNN. The firebreather from Georgia is known for a few things: her now-recanted belief in QAnon, her loyalty to President Trump and her America First isolationism. When I once asked her on the Hill about Nigel Farage, her eyes were full of disdain as she stressed that her heart lay at home.
But here she was, live on CNN, calling for an end to a Trump-inflected politics conducted with fire and fury. She apologised for her divisive rhetoric in the past. She trotted out the favourite line of bygone idealists: that Americans have far more in common than divides them. Perhaps the most noteworthy moment was when she said the president wasn’t being honest about her decision not to stand for the Senate. MTG, as she is known, is the latest Trump devotee to realise that loyalty in Trumpland is a one-way street.
The details of that particular disagreement don’t matter here. What does matter is that one of Trump’s most devoted supporters is drawing a line in Maga world between herself and the president, all while the movement itself judders in confusion over who can serve in its ranks and whether the man leading it still believes in what they thought he stood for.
It’s worth distinguishing between two types of populism. One is a mode of political communication: pitting “us” against “them,” using indecorum to seem authentic and running down institutions and attacking mainstream media. Then there is the older populist tradition, particular to America, beginning in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson, which puts class loyalty above party interests. The two modes of populism can go hand in hand: think of the populist authoritarian from Louisiana, Huey Long, who declared over the radio in 1934 that a nation’s survival depended on keeping “wealth scattered among the people”.
But Trump has always favoured the rhetoric over the substance. His tax cuts in his first term favoured the rich. Breaking up the oligarchy is only important to Trump when these tech princes cross him. He enriches himself as rising prices descend on blameless Americans. He gilds the White House while his base is blasted with adverts telling them to BUY GOLD.
The latest tranche of the Epstein files brings this all into focus. Trump’s name repeatedly pops up in the files: expected, yes, but disgusting all the same. To give you a sense of the documents’ general tone, here’s one example. In 2018 Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Steve Bannon to arrange dinner. Epstein noted that Miroslav Lajčák, a senior Slovak politician, could help Bannon. He added that the Slovakian “govt will fall this week – as planned. :)”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that elites plot and plan as much as those vying to get elected to the PTA. But this is pure catnip to conspiracists.
The Epstein files are so dangerous to Trump because they reveal that the man the people elected to drain the swamp has, all along, been sipping Diet Cokes with the alligators themselves. Trump’s usually unerring grasp of the populist mood is breaking under the brute fact of his time spent in the decades before 2016 as an embittered member of the elite. I also suspect that this has something to do with his belonging to a fading generation. Maga is beginning to wonder what comes after its figurehead has gone.
That niggle grows when you consider the case of the vice-president. Throughout the recent split within Maga, JD Vance has been poking his head above the White House fence to fling out social media missives slyly calibrated to keep him popular with the base. Vance is one of the most intellectually alacritous members of the administration. Ignore the wishful progressive squeal: Vance is clever, well-read and serious. He has more charisma than his critics give him credit for. It goes without saying that this, in itself, does not make him good. Remember, he is playing a long game to secure the Republican nomination in 2028.
We can learn a lot about where he thinks Maga is heading by when and how he speaks out. Vance has not weighed in on the fight over Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his podcast; instead, he said that the “infighting is stupid” at a time when rightists see the vice-president as one of the few people with the influence to gatekeep which views are acceptable. Vance is leaning in to the right’s drift toward the extremes. Meanwhile, his president is watching his own influence recede.
The pressure on Trump is so intense that he has decided that telling Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files in full is now his best option for repairing the breach in his movement. It is a ploy that underscores Trump’s waning power over the beast he has long controlled. His erstwhile loyalists are now fashioning a Trumpian politics without the need for Trump. In a recent interview with Fox News, the president said, “I know what Maga wants better than anyone else.” When you have to say it, it is no longer true.
[Further reading: The Epstein Files have turned Washington against Trump]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes