The MAGA movement can “walk back” outrageous statements, and the press hardly asks a follow-up.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, speaks to members of the media at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on July 3, 2025.(Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
For all the justified focus on the second Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda, and the suite of debased governing protocols that go with it, the basic messaging apparatus behind it has received scant attention. As it happens, this past weekend supplied a pair of textbook illustrations showing how the MAGA power elite throttle the mediasphere to serve their purposes.
Exhibit A was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bizarre declaration to Capitol Hill reporters that President Donald Trump had operated as an FBI informant during his decade-and-a-half friendship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” Johnson confidently asserted, without presenting any evidence.
In all likelihood, Johnson—a reliable MAGA wind sock who famously sought to contrive a constitutional rationale for the failed coup of January 6—let his base-pandering instincts lead him into fanfic-style delusion. But, as is often the case in such episodes, the delusion shored up a key plank of the Q-pilled GOP base’s fantasizing about the Trump-Epstein relationship; for the QAnon faithful, the notion that Trump was an informant rationalizes his long bro-ship with Epstein.
Never mind that Trump himself has disavowed any past civilian dealings with the FBI, even though he did do some informing work to advance his casino interests—something far more on-brand for him than a deep-cover op targeting a notorious sexual predator of underage girls. Never mind as well that if Trump did undertake this covert role, it didn’t stop him from helping Epstein’s allies; in 2017, Trump’s first White House signed on Alexander Acosta, the former Florida prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s get-out-of-jail agreement there, as its secretary of labor. And never mind that just two months ago, Trump abruptly fired the federal prosecutor who did bring Epstein to justice, without any plausible rationale. But the denizens of the overlapping worlds of QAnon and MAGA are never detained by mundane considerations of evidence.
Even so, Johnson’s contention provoked instant pushback, most significantly from the White House itself, since informants are, in most legal cases, co-perpetrators. In his purblind rounds as Trump sycophant, Johnson wound up drawing the very sort of attention to Trump’s standing in Epstein’s circle that the administration is desperately seeking to short-circuit. So Johnson was forced to issue a clarifying statement, which, as is typical for the genre, clarified nothing whatsoever. “The speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator,” the statement read in part.
Johnson was clumsily referencing a remark by Brad Edwards, an attorney for several Epstein victims, suggesting that Trump had cooperated with his efforts to document Epstein’s abuses; but Edwards’s full comments at last week’s press conference held by Epstein victims indicate that after Trump had discussed victims’ complaints with him in 2009, Trump did “an about-face” on holding Epstein accountable; nor had Edwards ever intimated that Trump had worked with federal law enforcement officials. In other words: Johnson was trying to deflect attention from his own wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case with another wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case.
This was not, however, the takeaway from the coverage of the initial gaffe and its aftermath—even The Washington Post’s own story citing Edwards’s comments meekly records that Johnson “backed off” the informant claim, without citing the broader conspiracy-mongering movement on the right that emboldened him to float it in the first place. Newsweek was content to report that Johnson had “clarified” his informant comment—something that occurred in no known universe where words have meaning.
Likewise, no news outlet covering the controversy bothered to supply any context for Johnson’s rushed citation of Epstein’s eviction from the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago, which comes across in the speaker’s statement as another blow struck on behalf of Epstein’s victims. It’s true that in some of Trump’s explanations of the rupture between the two men, Epstein’s creepy attention to a Mar-a-Lago member’s daughter plays a role. But Trump’s own most recent account suggests that the breach occurred because Epstein “stole” former Mar-a-Lago employee Virginia Giuffre from him—scarcely the language likely to be adopted by a heroic undercover figure exposing Epstein’s career as a sex trafficker.
Instead, the whole news cycle’s coverage of Johnson’s remark followed the standard Beltway template for political leaders briefly tripped up by their own public statements: a formalist exercise whereby a moment of potential scandal is passively “walked back” and all the relevant players are palpably relieved to move on.
The same content-challenged, context-ignoring discourse dominated the weekend’s other MAGA-walkback moment: Trump’s own decision to post a Truth Social meme indicating his White House is preparing to go to war with the city of Chicago under the paper-thin pretext of combating violent crime there. There’s even less room in this case for a Trump-excusing interpretation than there was in Johnson’s aside; Trump said outright that Chicago was about to find out why Trump has renamed the Defense Department as the Department of War, and the meme features an image of Trump decked out as Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. (Which Trump glossed as, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”) Lest any of this somehow land with muffled impact, the meme appeared under the heading “Chipocalypse Now” with an image of the city’s skyline.
Nevertheless, the same mannered and brain-dead media “walk back” proceeded on schedule. The White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan took to CNN’s State of the Union to declare, ludicrously, that Trump’s meme was “taken out of context” and that “criminal cartels” are the object of the country’s militarized wrath. You’d think a follow-up question might have surfaced asking why, if that were in fact the case, the meme didn’t bear the legend “Cartel-pocalypse Now” (which is far more euphonious than the Windy City–baiting one it employed), or stipulate that the cartels, and not the city, was going to get a crash course in the reason behind the Pentagon’s renaming.
I know that many important organizations are asking you to donate today, but this year especially, The Nation needs your support.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration has presided over a government designed to chill activism and dissent.
The Nation experienced its efforts to destroy press freedom firsthand in September, when Vice President JD Vance attacked our magazine. Vance was following Donald Trump’s lead—waging war on the media through a series of lawsuits against publications and broadcasters, all intended to intimidate those speaking truth to power.
The Nation will never yield to these menacing currents. We have survived for 160 years and we will continue challenging new forms of intimidation, just as we refused to bow to McCarthyism seven decades ago. But in this frightening media environment, we’re relying on you to help us fund journalism that effectively challenges Trump’s crude authoritarianism.
For today only, a generous donor is matching all gifts to The Nation up to $25,000. If we hit our goal this Giving Tuesday, that’s $50,000 for journalism with a sense of urgency.
With your support, we’ll continue to publish investigations that expose the administration’s corruption, analysis that sounds the alarm on AI’s unregulated capture of the military, and profiles of the inspiring stories of people who successfully take on the ICE terror machine.
We’ll also introduce you to the new faces and ideas in this progressive moment, just like we did with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. We will always believe that a more just tomorrow is in our power today.
Please, don’t miss this chance to double your impact. Donate to The Nation today.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
Instead, the press obligingly lapped up the MAGA-branded lying about the MAGA-branded lying. Homan’s dissembling act billowed through the Sunday news cycle in exactly the same fashion that Johnson’s did, with interested viewers and readers essentially told there was nothing to see here. Meanwhile, a typically abusive and untruthful Trump exchange with NBC reporter Yamiche Alcindor about the same post yielded this milquetoast headline in The New York Times: “Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Says He Wants to ‘Clean Up’ City.”
Of course, a functioning political press might have observed that napalm—the substance that charmed the olfactory of Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the deadly folly of the US war against North Vietnam—was also adopted in that conflict under the pretext of cleaning things up: to expose Viet Cong positions and clear vegetation. (The inventor of the incendiary gel also never envisioned it being used against humans but as a means of destroying buildings.) A critically minded press corps might even go further to note that the character of Kilgore in the film represents the very blind jingoist hubris that the Trump administration is tapping into as it launches its war on American cities—and that the Vietnam War, particularly as depicted in Coppola’s film, is as far as you can conceivably get from a narrative of executive-branch heroism. But what am I saying? It’s all been walked back, after all.
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).