Will Sommer writes:

Trump World fell into chaos just before the weekend, as the shock from the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein memo continued to reverberate. Donald Trump’s initial response—a long Saturday-afternoon post that urged everyone to just get over it—earned the president a rare hostile “ratio” on Truth Social, his own social media platform. Even right-wing media figures who would normally fall in line behind the president took issue with his long, meandering, often self-contradictory statement, apparently unwilling to alienate their Epstein-crazed audiences.

Maybe worse, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—whose high level of interest in the public’s view of him has been a recurring subject of this newsletter—appeared on the verge of resigning in outrage over Attorney General Pam Bondi’s move to declare the Epstein case closed. (Bongino did reportedly show up to work today, which we didn’t realize was optional for the second in command at the FBI.)

Everyone, it seems, now hates everyone else. Which was the perfect backdrop for all of them to congregate at a big party in Florida, the perfect location for a mid-July gathering!

Administration officials and MAGA luminaries like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson descended upon Tampa last weekend for Charlie Kirk’s Student Action Summit. In its first iteration of the new Trump term, Turning Point USA’s recurring young-conservative confab should’ve been a celebration. Instead, it became a fraught family reunion where attendees publicly tried to hash out whether everyone should just swallow their pride and move on from the Epstein saga as Trump had directed them to do.

Over the course of the event, it became clear that there are now five distinct Epstein factions within the MAGA movement, creating a type of factionalism that is uncommon among Trump’s backers. Here, dear reader, is your handy guide to those factions. [Continue reading…]