The Daily Populous Saturday February 21st, 2026 morning edition
Authored by thenation.com and submitted by thenationmagazine

Politics / MAGA’s Reaction to the Epstein Files Reveals Total Moral Collapse The right’s moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all.

President Donald Trump speaks with the media after a visit to the Fort Bragg Army base on February 13, 2026, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. (Nathan Howard / Getty Images)

I’m not sure we’re terrified enough about the American right’s scrapping even its own scant moral boundaries.

Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where right-wingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

At least, for themselves. The right still has morals for days when it comes to Black folks, immigrants and trans people. Its moral code has always been selective and conditional; rigorously enforced and mercilessly punitive toward “outsiders” and “others,” but generally indifferent to even the worst acts by those on the right side of whiteness and power. Wilhoit’s Law—coined by music composer Frank Wilhoit in a now-famous 2018 comment on a political science blog—neatly captures this truth. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition—there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Now it’s ditching even its in-group protections.

The right’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures is the clearest evidence of this. For the better part of a decade, conservatives lurched from one pedophile-focused moral panic to the next, proclaiming themselves the true saviors of children. They didn’t mean all children, of course; these are the same people who gifted a white woman with $750,000 just for calling a 5-year-old autistic Black boy the N-word. Their concern was always reserved for the white children they saw as fully human. They insisted pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlor basements; obsessed over Q drops and waved signs calling us to “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking”; and pushed anti-LGBT “groomer” hysteria alongside anti-drag bills. Roughly half of Trump voters said they believed elected Democrats were running child sex rings in surveys from 2020 and 2022; a majority of 2020 Trump voters told pollsters that Trump was actively working to take down “an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats.” White lives mattered to conservatives, especially the youngest white lives. At least in theory.

And at least as long as they thought their political opponents were responsible. But the more we know about Epstein, the less they care. The nearly half of Republicans who said the Epstein files mattered at least “a little” to how they assess Trump’s presidency in July 2025 dropped to just 36 percent by November. (That figure is 64 percent for Democrats.) Faced with at least one allegation in the files that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl and well-documented associations between their leader and Epstein—as well as other alleged sexual predators—the right isn’t just overlooking the implications; they’re abandoning the principles. The right has “gradually de-emphasized” the Epstein issue, CNN writes, choosing to “largely move on.” It was all political calculation.

That might also explain why conservatives, in rebutting the need for greater transparency about the files’ contents, unfailingly bring up the appearance of Bill Clinton’s name in the Epstein files. They assume that the left’s response will be to ditch the issue if there’s no partisan benefit, because that’s what they would do. They genuinely don’t understand that a person might hold a principle like, say, opposing pedophilia, regardless of who engages in it. The notion of sincere moral outrage grounded in right and wrong, instead of political advantage, is genuinely lost on them.

The moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all. His supporters are members of a reactionary movement almost singularly animated by racial grievance. Trump supporters believed that the racial contract—and above all, its guarantee that whiteness was the most immutable hurdle to the American presidency—had been broken. “We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama,” Megyn Kelly said just this past September, a reminder of the imagined injury white racists sustained nearly two decades ago. Trump promised to not just restore the racial contract but to punish the people his supporters saw as responsible for breaching it. In exchange, they elevated an openly, extravagantly corrupt white man to the presidency.

When your most coherent ideology is “owning the libs” and fighting against racial equality, and you’ve literally elected one of the most demonstrably immoral people in public life to deliver on both, the moral line can never stop moving. That means every newly horrifying revelation requires the right to set a new moral boundary so that Trump can jump over it before it’s done being drawn. It means accepting the corrupt enrichment of not just the entire Trump family, but pardons and commutations for everybody with a bribe or political clout—the January 6 insurrectionists; comically dishonest former representative George Santos; ex-Honduran president and cocaine and weapons trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez. “I think this is the most corrupt presidency in US history, with the money they are raking in, with the NFTs and the memecoins. I mean it’s so blatant, it’s right in front of our eyes,” Ann Coulter admitted, unashamedly, on the Triggernometry podcast in August, adding, “and the funny thing about [it is], I don’t care, as long as we get a wall and mass deportations.”

AcanthisittaBulky777 on February 20th, 2026 at 21:52 UTC »

It is well documented that MAGA Conservatives lack the ability to feel empathy for people who aren’t physically in front of them or in their daily lives. https://www.psypost.org/new-neuroscience-research-shows-liberals-experience-more-empathy-than-conservatives-when-they-imagine-others-suffering/

earl-j-waggedorn on February 20th, 2026 at 21:45 UTC »

"He didn't do it. If he did, it wasn't his fault. And also, what's the big deal?"

transcriptoin_error on February 20th, 2026 at 21:35 UTC »

MAGA was never a moral movement. It’s always been tribalism and racism.