MAGA breaks free of President Trump

With the smooth passage of the Epstein Transparency Act in both the US House of Representatives and Senate, MAGA has shown that several within it are no longer shackled to the whims of President Trump.

It is true that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has some views that are extremely controversial, but she merits congratulations for being among the few Representatives who were clear from the outset of the controversy that the Epstein files should be released in their entirety. Hers was the correct moral stand, and she refused to bend on it despite very public pressure from President Trump.

It is clear from the release of the Epstein files that the Make America Great Again movement launched by President Trump in his first—and successful—bid for the US Presidency in 2016 has broken free of President Trump.

Once Trump denied as fake news a public statement by President Reagan against tariffs, it was clear that something was awry in the compass that had been almost completely unerring in its location of the Right course (pun intended) for Trump to take in his battle with Joe Biden, a battle in which he finally bested Biden in 2024 after losing to him in 2020 to take up residence in the White House on January 20 this year.

After being forced by a rebellious Republican group of lawmakers to sign the Epstein bill on November 19, US Attorney General Pam Bondi is busily trying to subvert the law while constantly claiming that she will “follow the law”.

President Trump has 30 days to release all the files, and you can be sure his Justice Department will have Trump loyalists poring through the immense amounts of data to cull out those bits that may incriminate Trump. They will make an effort to prevent these bits (or bites, rather) from being publicly revealed, all in the name of “protecting the victims” of Jeffrey Epstein and his clients.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and a few other senior Trump-appointed officials may cross the edge into criminality in their devotion to President Trump. They need to pull back from such a course, and pull back now. Public anger will boil over were there to be evidence of a cover-up by them of the facts found in the files.

Given public sentiment about the files, the uproar will continue until all the files are released. Finally, the names of the victims would be redacted, but not the identity of the perpetrators of the unspeakable actions done on them. She should not be another John Mitchell, getting prosecuted because he took part in the cover-up of the Watergate files.

Were the Republicans in the US Congress to go along with the cover-up, they would get trounced not just daily in the court of public opinion but in the 2026 midterms, in which they would be handing over control of the House of Representatives and the Senate to the Democrats, who seem to be willing to throw under the bus any past Democratic US President or high official found guilty of wrongdoing through release of the files.

In case there is evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump—that is the only logical reason why he has been fighting so hard to keep the files secret, and now to keep parts of the files secret—his party is almost certainly not going to join him in committing possible illegality.

Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and other high officials should steer away from the quicksand of an Epstein cover-up on the lines of the Watergate cover-up.

In the meantime, Vice-President J.D. Vance needs to keep away from the mess, in order to ensure that his reputation for integrity remains. Covering up criminal actions does not Make America Great Again, rather, it shames the nation.

Once Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes, it was the beginning of the end for the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

Once titbits began to dribble out into the public sphere about the closeness of Trump and Epstein, the genie was out of the bottle. It will singe and burn those who seek to push it back.