Mother Jones illustration; Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images; Davidoff Studios/Getty
Since 2018, TrishaHope 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 recentlytoldPoliticothat 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 25thAmendment to be invoked to remove him from office. “He’s insane,” shewrote 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 wildlyrampant corruptionthat 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 aJuly 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 riseto 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 aSatanic pedophile ringout 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 evenlivestreamedthe 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 rifleshowed up at Cometon a mission to rescue the children. He fired a couple of rounds into the restaurant. Fortunately, no one was injured.
The fact that the shooter found no captive children, much less a basement, did not put a damper on the conspiracy theory. A poll conducted after the shooting found thatnearly half of Trump’s voterscontinued to believe itwas real. Even six years after the shooting, Katie Zacharia, who was briefly Trump’s press secretary this month, was amplifying the theory on social media.
Pizzagate didn’t go away, but it did morph into QAnon, a cult-like movement whose believers took their cues from a mysterious internet poster known as Q. Influential Trump supporters, including Trump’s first short-lived national security advisorMichael Flynn, became proponents.
In 2018, Trump started signaling to QAnon believers that he was with them. Brandon Straka, one of thefirst people arrestedfor participating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, even invoked the QAnon motto from the stage at a 2019 Trump rally, crying at the end of his speech, “Where we go one, we go all!”
Q hasn’t posted anything in about four years, but his wild visions of child predators among the global elite have escaped the fever swamp of the internet and gone mainstream,thanks in part to Trump. By the end of 2024, nearly20 percent of voterspolled by PRRI, and 32 percent of Trump supporters,reported believing the conspiracy theory’s core tenets. So, when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for a second time in 2019, and later died in prison,allegedly by suicide, the wealthy and stunningly well-connected sexual predator became proof that the conspiracy theory was not entirely a hoax.
Trump himself rarely invoked Epstein in his public statements, but during his years out of office, his surrogates repeatedly called for the government to release the files, including their holy grail: the alleged client list. “Been calling for ALL of it to be released so the public can have accountability,” now-FBI Director Kash Patel posted on social media in December 2023.“We must find out who pedo’d around with Epstein.”
