Since 2018, Trisha Hope has crisscrossed the country to attend 42 of President Trump’s rallies as a “Front Row Joe,” a group of some of Trump’s most committed fans. But she recently told Politico that if Republicans lose the midterms and Democrats impeach Trump next year, “I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.”

Her interview landed like a bombshell less than a month before the midterm elections, where the Republican Party is expected to lose control of one, if not both, houses of Congress. If some of the Front Row Joes have abandoned Trump, who was left? Yet Hope’s defection wasn’t new. She has been publicly regretting her support for Trump for more than a year. In April, she even called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove him from office. “He’s insane,” she wrote on X.

There are plenty of obvious reasons for her to be unhappy with the president in his second term: the Iran war, gas prices, inflation, the wildly rampant corruption that has enriched Trump and his family by billions of dollars in less than two years. But Hope dumped Trump for another reason entirely: Jeffrey Epstein.

During a July 2025 cabinet meeting, Trump interrupted a reporter who’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi about the government’s huge trove of thus undisclosed documents related to the two prosecutions of the late sexual predator. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump fumed. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”

Hope was shocked. “President Trump’s lack of concern for the Epstein victims and his callous response to the reporter’s question,” she posted on X, “ends my relationship with him.”

In the face of near-daily Trump administration scandals, much of the country, and the mainstream media, has moved on from the Epstein files. But for a key segment of Trump’s most committed base, they remain front and center, and Trump’s having obstructed their release has been a key factor in some MAGA defections. “I think it was a real turning point on Trump,” says Carrie Dann, managing editor of the Cook Political Report.

Much of Trump’s improbable rise to power was driven by his ability to engage with a bloc of disaffected conservatives on the fringes who had never voted before. Unlike virtually any candidate before him, he successfully brought them into his coalition by tapping their belief in widespread conspiracy theories. Chief among those was Pizzagate, the notion that a global cabal of elite pedophiles headed by Hillary Clinton and her close advisers was running a Satanic pedophile ring out of the basement of DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria.

Pizzagate went viral during the 2016 presidential campaign, helped along by people now close to the Trump administration. One of its best-known promoters was Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer currently in the Pentagon’s official press corps. The former Navy intelligence officer even livestreamed the results of his amateur “investigation” into the pedophile ring from outside the family-friendly pizzeria in leafy northwest DC. About a month later, a North Carolina man toting an assault rifle showed up at Comet on a........

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