There’s a joke going around on the smart political writers and podcasters these days. It might be old, it might be new, and would absolutely credit whoever came up with it if they could be identified, but it goes like this: A JFK assassination truther dies and, having lived an otherwise pious and virtuous life, he’s welcomed into Heaven and given an audience with God. Naturally the first thing the departed soul asks is “What actually happened in Dealey Plaza?” and God says “Lee Harvey Oswald took a Carcano .38 up the Texas Book Depository and fired three shots at Kennedy’s car, with two of the bullets fatally striking the president. He was the only shooter and he acted alone.”
The truther then says “Oh no. This goes higher than I thought. They even got to God himself!”
MAGA will persist. There will still be the hats, the rallies, the stupid bullshit from ProudPatriots.com, the Trump flags, and everything in between. The fascist batshittery of the American right wing that preceded the rise of and then was supercharged by convicted felon President Trump in 2016 will remain energized for decades and will in all likelihood be picked up by another sui generis leader who can channel it. Maybe more masterfully, maybe less, maybe the same level. The right wing grift-o-sphere has plenty of future ahead of it even if its Dear Leader has both a constitutional and gerontological expiration date within sight by the end of the decade (subject to change).
And yet a major, monumental shift is underway. One whose ultimate end is unclear, but already a fundamental pillar of the MAGA movement as led by Trump has crumbled and almost certainly irreparably. A bell that cannot be unrung, signaled in a key, extremely significant, anonymously-sourced White House insider quote printed in a Rolling Stone story from this week. The dark heart of MAGA, seized up in a coronary, one of the attending physicians standing there, questioning whether to even bother charging up the defibrillator again to try to get it beating as unhealthily as before.
Realizing Trump is the God in that joke.
But first the history. A tentatively incomplete one. Not fully comprehensive either, as tempting as it would be to include the entirety of the “Biden Crime Family” saga in the long and winding tale. This quote from Elise Stefanik two years and a day ago, after her Lord and Savior was indicted by a grand jury for a third time that year will have to suffice to illustrate our friend Hunter’s contributions:
“Today is yet another dark day in America as Joe Biden continues to weaponize his corrupt Department of Justice against his leading political opponent Donald J Trump. Less than 24 hours ago, Congress heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner that Joe Biden joined Hunter’s business calls over 20 times. This directly contradicts Biden’s lie that he never discussed business with his son. Today’s sham indictment of Donald Trump is yet another desperate attempt to distract attention away from the mounting evidence of Joe Biden’s direct involvement in his family’s illegal influence peddling scheme – one of the greatest political corruption scandals in history,” said Stefanik of a “scandal” that had been whipped up on the fly in anticipation that Trump would have been hit with his third felony indictment on or about that day.
Or about five weeks earlier when extra thirsty Trump ballsucker Congressman Troy Nehls said he was going to open an investigation into the Navy to determine whether they intentionally waited to disclose that they had detected the sound of the implosion of the Titan submersible to divert media attention away from some whistleblower testifying about Hunter and his plea deal… Yeah, no follow-up from Nehls on that. He did however hint at where this larger piece is going a few months later when asked by a reporter why he was supporting the eventually-failed Biden impeachment effort.
“All I can say is Donald J Trump 2024, baby!” said Nehls as he puffed a cigar outside the Capitol.
But given the density of the whole Hunter can of crack-addicted worms and the dispositive differences with how he was weaponized against Joe – and that he’s not the main villain in the MAGA Cinematic Universe right now, this history needs to be more “timely” and as such confined to a fairly condensed recounting of all the times Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were so fucked and were DEFINITELY going to prison for the atrocities they committed before, during, and after the 2016 campaign – most of these right wing media news cycles ones self-generated by Team Trump.
[The “TLDR” people can click here to skip the history]
SPRING 2017 – SPRING 2019: DO SOMETHING!
Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?),….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2017
“…the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more. Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist. The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!” tweeted the fat fuck on Saturday October 29th, 2017, just hours after it was first reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had gotten plea deals out of what had been, until the following Monday, an unspecified number of Trump 2016 campaign minions.
Debated internally whether any of this specific kind of bullshit “counterpunch” directed at Hillary and/or Obama that came during the Mueller Investigation should’ve been included in this history because it’s spread out and messy. Like all things being equal in this too-long zero-sum game you can’t exactly fault Trump for impugning the motives of his accusers. Just because Dems were and are right to paint Trump as the most corrupt piece of shit to ever disgrace the White House does not mean they aren’t politically motivated or have ever not stood to benefit politically and electorally from his criminality. Both can be true at the same time. Biden’s defenders would say the same about Jim Jordan and James Comer and the rest of the fucking fanboys in the House during their incompetently conducted, ultimately failed effort to impeach Joe over Hunter’s very real grifts.
The point being that Trump’s efforts to turn it around on Hillary and Obama were happening every day during those two years and as such it’s too diffuse to sort them out save for the non-coincidental “uranium” salience – borne of absolute pants-pissing panic over the first wave of indictments in the Mueller investigation – and then a “Spygate” flap in mid-spring 2018 which came just over a month after the FBI raided then-loyal lawyer Michael Cohen’s office in the investigation into the Stormy Daniels payoff – the only crime Trump actually went on trial for six years later.
Less than a year later newly-(re)confirmed US Attorney General Fred Flintstone Bill Barr squashed the Mueller’s final report on the investigation and within a month or two after that appointed then-US Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham as special counsel to investigate the investigation. And that’s where this history begins in earnest.
MAY 2020: THE OBAMAGATES OF HELL
YEEEEESSSSSSSS!
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 10, 2020
You may recall that Spring 2020 wasn’t exactly a great time for the Trump Administration given certain extrinsic events – and how they were handled within the White House. Particularly the abrupt end to the president’s daily COVID briefings after he suggested people inject disinfectants into patients’ lungs to cure the virus. To try to divert media attention from the increasing death toll, the fat fuck decided to command the DOJ to drop the charges against traitor General Mike Flynn and coin a new metonym for the then-long-dead “persecution” campaign: Obamagate.
What is Obamagate exactly and how was it different from Spygate? It has a different name. One that sounds snappier and more “Hollywood”-y. So “Hollywood”-y in fact that MAGA actor Dean Cain and the original 1990s Buffy The Vampire Slayer actress Kristy Swanson starred as “traitor” FBI agents Peter Lisa Page in “OBAMAGATE: THE MOVIE,” which premiered on October 20th, 2020:
That’s not a trailer. That’s the entire movie. The whole thing’s on YouTube, for free. Not even fucking 2000 Mules was free and… Holy shit that is so pathetic that they rushed this into production and distributed it for free two weeks before the election like it would’ve mattered.
Anyway, more seriously this history is – as much as possible – far more about context than content, or “content” like a 71 minute propaganda movie. For one, very rarely did it fucking matter what the newest BOMBSHELL was so much as there was any sort of bullshit that John Solomon and his ilk could present as new and pretend it was a “BOMBSHELL.” It’s not even like Trump himself bothers to learn the inane details of these moronic stories or why Nellie Ohr was such a monster.
The FBI documents that put Barack Obama in the ‘Obamagate’ narrative. Agents worried sharing Flynn evidence with outgoing Obama White House might lead to ‘partisan axes’| Just The News https://t.co/qTgsHlPJBm
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) May 26, 2020
Feel free to click on that article and bore yourself to tears on all that horseshit that Solomon, to his “credit,” maintains kayfabe and not only acts like is important, but is also able to keep track of the Wookiepedia-level minutiae of his fictional universe and all its contradictions.
The rest of the 2020 campaign saw no further flare-ups of “Obamagate,” save for some MAGA rage over Bill Barr’s failure to get Durham to release a report, even one half-done, to use as spank material for the fat fuck’s doomed reelection campaign as if it would have mattered.
FEBRUARY 2022: THEY SPIED!!!
NEW!
President Donald J. Trump:
"THEY SPIED ON THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!" pic.twitter.com/95UnB1k21B
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) February 13, 2022
It took the disgraced then-former president a day to regain his composure and put out a lengthier statement about this episode that surfaced unexpectedly: “Can you imagine that, what should be the biggest story of our time, bigger than Watergate, is getting absolutely no mention, ZERO, in the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, ratings- dead CNN, and MSDNC. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful, and so important for the future of our Nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world. Just like they wouldn’t talk about the many Biden corruption scandals prior to the Election, (or for that matter now!), they won’t talk about this, which is potentially even bigger.”
“It shows how totally corrupt and shameless the media is. Can you imagine if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement. The good news is, everybody is talking about not only this atrocity against our Nation, but that the press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Trump continued angrily, insisting that it was being talked about all over the world – except in the media.
What was “it”? “Interestingly this specific freakout was extrinsic in that Trump and his fanboys weren’t kicking it up themselves so much as one semi-reliably MAGA actor John Durham in a court filing mentioned some shit about a contractor testing the cybersecurity of the Oval Office, which the right wing propaganda industrial complex immediately spun into “Hillary paid hackers to spy on Trump in the White House” by cherry-picking Durham’s technical language about DNS traffic monitoring and adding their own conspiracy porn terms like “infiltrate” that weren’t in the filing at all.
Even if it was (largely) manufactured outside of the MAGAverse “organically” and seized upon immediately it still became part of a “distraction op” narrative – that being Fox Business Newsmoron Maria Bartiromo’s theory that the Biden Administration were faking the warnings of an imminent Russia invasion of Ukraine to distract from Hillary and Obama getting caught spying on Trump.
Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine seven days later and the war’s been going on ever since, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides, but going to go out on a limb here and guess that Maria never issued any sort of correction on that.
That very stupid news cycle, which Durham did not help propagate by later clarifying/walking back his original bullshit claim in a subsequent filing after the judge ordered him to get his shit together, marked the beginning of a very long dormant period in the Obamagate saga – one that Durham did not help either by failing to land guilty verdicts in the two trials he brought against obscure characters connected. “Our Legal System is CORRUPT, our Judges (and Justices!) are highly partisan, compromised or just plain scared, our Borders are OPEN, our Elections are Rigged, Inflation is RAMPANT, gas prices and food costs are ‘through the roof,’ our Military ‘Leadership’ is Woke, our Country is going to HELL, and Michael Sussmann is not guilty. How’s everything else doing? Enjoy your day!!!” raged the fat fuck several months later, after the first of those failures by Durham.
The 2016 election had finally ended there in 2022, replaced by the 2020 election and Hunter’s laptop and the constitution needing to be terminated and Trump declared the winner two years later, transitioning into his successful and lie-fueled campaign to return to power in 2024.
Then one of those lies came back to bite him in his flabby orange ass.
JULY 2025: THE DECLINE OF THE MAGA CONSPIRACY EMPIRE
“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” wrote someone at the Department of Justice in an unsigned memo dumped at around 8pm on the Sunday of Fourth of July weekend, walking back a campaign promise and setting in motion weeks of near-existential torment for the Trump Reich and the propaganda ecosystem that surrounds him, some parts of which are now asking out loud whether their Lord and Savior raped sex-trafficking victims supplied to him by Jeffrey Epstein.
Even to those who don’t want to go that far – Dem, Republican, independent, MAGA, socialist, anarchist – at the VERY LEAST it’s now a virtual certainty that Trump knew what was going on and had in the 1990s and early 2000s been fully aware that Epstein and his pals had been violating young girls and that Trump is protecting rather than pursuing the villains of the QAnon mythos.
The fact that the FBI fucking redacted Trump’s name from the files that his minions later should tell you how bad the Epstein storm is. As should that it took them 11 days to come up with this shit:
So fucking obvious was what was going on with this inscrutable nonsense that even the shitweasels at Axios were forced to acknowledge it, writing “President Trump is redirecting his fury over the Jeffrey Epstein files into one of MAGA’s oldest obsessions: punishing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the officials involved in the 2016 Russia investigation.” Of course they left out the fact that none of what Gabbard called a “crime” was true, but that – or expecting them to address Tulsi claiming Hillary was on fucking horse tranquilizers – would be asking too much from the bullet point factory.
Funny enough, that was actually the second “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” distraction of that month as the regime had planted in Breitbart “Report: FBI Launches Investigation into John Brennan, James Comey Over Trump-Russia Probe” as a smokescreen for the rollout of the July 6th Epstein memo.
WTF are you doing?
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) July 9, 2025
Then it was the “strike force” (lol)…
.@Jim_Jordan reacts on @seanhannity as the DOJ launches a strike force to investigate new Russiagate evidence, saying "it was worse than we thought." pic.twitter.com/ZAnwEuGmEL
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 24, 2025
…the “burn bags”…
The tentacles stretch far beyond Crossfire Hurricane. The burn bags are only the surface.
This was a disinformation campaign carried out by our own intelligence agencies on the American people.
The Durham annex reveals the Clinton campaign’s plan to smear Trump with lies,… pic.twitter.com/YHbWMzRjUe
— Rep. Claudia Tenney (@RepTenney) July 31, 2025
…and the “newly-revealed” Hillary email that somehow Russia didn’t find…
BREAKING: Declassified Durham Appendix Shows Hillary Clinton PERSONALLY Approved Trump-Russia Hoax and Used FBI to Put “More Oil on the Fire” https://t.co/xYXXBsBNaF
— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) July 31, 2025
The last one, hyping Old Man Grassley’s claim that “The Durham annex [God this is so fucking lame] contains previously classified information exposing a reported Clinton campaign plan to falsely tie President Donald Trump to Russia,” raises another very interesting and, not going to lie, almost entirely rhetorical question in relation to the whole fucking point of this newest, most balls-to-the-walls-iest Obamagate propaganda offensive. Trump himself actually kind of raised this on July 15th when he said “You know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden,” and then adding “And we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through,” while ranting at reporters on the White House lawn, just one of several times the fat fuck asserted as much.
That question is this: There’s obviously a lot of old material that can be used to fit the MAGA narrative and to make it look like Obama, Hillary, Comey, et al, were committing the “crime of the century” by tying Trump to Russian intel agents. Shouldn’t it be just as easy to find material showing a concerted effort to tie him to the far more visceral crimes of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring?
That’s not even expecting Team Orange to actually release what they claim is fabricated material on Trump. If they can “prove” that “Crossfire Hurricane” was a hoax then why can’t the do it with Epstein? When is Kash Patel going to release THOSE emails if he can’t release the Epstein files?
THE END OF MAGA HISTORY
Just because it’s wrote to say the MAGA Empire was built on conspiracy theories – Obama birtherism, Pizzagate, the “collusion hoax,” the Great Replacement, Jewish space lasers, the 2020 election with the Italian satellites and Chinese thermostats, Antifa was at the capitol riot, Biden is a robot clone, and everything in between – does not make it any less fundamentally true.
It’s a movement built on insecurity. You didn’t get the job because of affirmative action, a Black guy got it instead. Women are avoiding you because Jewish feminists brainwashed them. You can’t afford a house because the Chinese communists buying up American real estate priced you out of the market. All your personal suffering and powerlessness that’s no fault of your own gets rolled into the endless hurricane of grievance and resentment that focuses its hatreds on the “elites” embodied by Hillary, Obama, Biden, Soros, and so on, and NOTHING would make you happier or vindicate you more than seeing them go down in flames. All you had to do was vote Trump back into power and justice would be yours. ESPECIALLY for Epstein’s accomplices… And now this is where they’re at:
The key quote promised earlier, copied verbatim from Rolling Stone to not mince words:
“It’s another ticking time bomb for himself,” a Trump adviser says. “We are promising them that these people committed the crime of the century, and that Dems are going down for this. What if we don’t… take them down? It’d be a broken promise.”
One Trump administration official adds that “people aren’t buying it.” The official notes they have received messages from high-profile Trump allies and MAGA-aligned influencers insisting that this “Obamagate” reboot will not get them to move on from Epstein. Some of these allies have already told this official different, eye-roll-style versions of “I’ll believe it when I see it,” regarding the Trump administration’s promise that they have conclusive proof of Obama and others’ criminal, indictable activities.
It’s janky. It’s not a direct quote. It’s anonymous. Reporter Asawin Suebsaeng’s sources always seem like they come from a different corner of the Trump Regime than those of the uppermost tier like Maggie Haberman, Jon Swan, Josh Dawsey, Marc Caputo, Kaitlan Collins, Jon Karl, etc. But the bolded part of the above is possibly one of the most significant quotes ever in the history of MAGA.
A Trump Administration official appears to have just admitted outright that they’re rolling out all of this Obamagate bullshit (presumably also announcing what’ll almost certainly be a dead-end investigation of Jack Smith) with the deliberate intent of trying to distract from Epstein.
Yes, it was very painfully fucking obvious that was the intent – because there are no coincidences in these forever wars – but for them to actually say it while remarking on the exhaustion and impatience from an influencer class jerked around far too many times for far too many years?
That’s a Rubicon crossing. An irreversible shift. For over a decade now even when they kid of winked they still took all their horseshit fantasies at least seriously enough in front of their fan base. Now in one little moment Santa Claus is just a guy in a suit getting his lap pissed on at the mall.
Three and a half more years of this fat sack of orange shit in the White House are still going to suck. We’ll be poorer, angrier, dumber, more embarrassed, more cynical, more nihilistic. But with that magic belief in Trump being the answer to so many fucking stupid people’s hopes for vindication finally dissipating, it’s going to be almost as miserable and unenjoyable for the fanboys too.