When Attorney General Pam Bondi declared in a memo on July 10 that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” for the countless files, pictures and video held by the Department of Justice related to the late pedophile and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein she unleashed a firestorm.

After serving up red meat to conservative conspiracists for years about Epstein and the elite pedophile sex ring he operated, Bondi turned the tables on them. Instead of revealing the truth as everyone from Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, Donald Trump Jr., billionaire Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and even President Donald Trump promised, the Trump administration now appeared to be in on the cover-up.

Conservative influencers rebelled, castigating the administration for failing to live up to its promise. Trump, meanwhile, made the story worse, claiming the whole Epstein story was a “scam” and a “hoax” cooked up by Democrats like former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He told his supporters to pound sand, calling them “stupid” and “weaklings” and that “I don’t want their support anymore!” Trump and White House officials have spent weeks now trying to calm their conservative allies and strong-arm them into not talking about Epstein anymore.

The scandal spiralled further soon after Bondi fired career DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey, who is not just the daughter of former FBI director and Trump nemesis James Comey, but was also the lead prosecutor on the Epstein case. On Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that among the files seized from Epstein’s property by the DOJ is a bawdy letter Trump sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday back in 2003.

The letter includes a drawing of a nude woman with Trump’s signature applied over her pubic region. Trump’s ode to Epstein includes lines like, “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” and “may every day be another wonderful secret,” which can only send the paranoid mind racing. Trump angrily denied the letter was real, claimed he tried to get Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch to kill the story and threatened to sue the Journal, Murdoch and the Journal’s parent corporation NewsCorp.

Jeffrey Epstein was "Donald’s closest friend for ten years," Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff.

Seeming to bow to pressure, Trump then directed Bondi to try and get the Epstein grand jury to allow the disclosure of “pertinent” documents. It is, however, unclear whether Bondi would allow the release of documents naming Trump or if the judge overseeing the grand jury would take the extremely rare step of unsealing the grand jury documents. There are also thousands of other Epstein-related documents held by the federal government that Trump did not call to be released.

Indeed, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Bondi on Friday claiming that “approximately 1,000 personnel” from the FBI were put on round-the-clock duty to review “approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records” and “instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

Of all the stories, scandals and policies that have followed Trump since he entered politics, why has this one, above all others, caused such enormous blowback from Trump’s own supporters? And why is this scandal not a “distraction,” as some Democrats seem to reflexively claim?

Why The Right Is Big Mad

To understand the conservative blowup around Epstein, one must first understand the heart of Trumpist politics. These politics have been routinely labeled as populist over the past decade. But this populism is not centred on populist policies designed to help the masses — universal health care, crackdowns on corporations, higher taxes on the wealthy, limits on money in politics or closing offshore tax shelters. Instead of policy, Trump’s right-wing populism provides the masses with attacks on alien others —........

© HuffPost