President Donald Trump’s allies at Fox News — and other major MAGA media figures — are obeying his marching orders to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was awaiting trial on charges that he sexually abused dozens of underage girls when he died by suicide in jail in 2019.
Prominent MAGA voices were in near-open rebellion last week after the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued in an unsigned July 6 memo stating that there was no “credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” and that investigators “concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell.” Those conclusions contradicted dogmas pushed by Trumpist talking heads — including FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Within days, many MAGA diehards were calling for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s resignation or firing.
By Sunday, the simmering discontent seemed primed to boil over, as Fox News anchors and prominent pro-Trump speakers at a summit organized by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA warned that if Trump didn’t listen to his base, he risked losing them. But the president instead issued a statement that evening in which he stood by Bondi and demanded that his allies “not waste Time and Energy” on the Epstein saga.
By Sunday, the simmering discontent seemed primed to boil over.
Trump’s statement put to the test the MAGA pundits and influencers who had told their audiences for years that wealthy elites, corrupt officials and the mainstream press were covering up for Epstein. And most of them, particularly Fox’s anchors and hosts, promptly bent the knee.
Epstein’s name was brought up only eight times across the network’s programming on Monday, with its first reference coming well into the 6 p.m. hour. By contrast, Fox name-checked former President Joe Biden 158 times that same day.
Jesse Watters, who holds down the 8 p.m. time slot previously held by stars Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson, provides a case study of the network’s compliance. The Fox host mentioned Epstein’s name across more than 100 episodes of his programs over the last six years. Watters said he was “leading the charge to expose Jeffrey Epstein’s list of fixers, clients, and famous friends,” unlike the corrupt mainstream press whose silence he claimed aided the “powerful people [who] want to keep you from knowing about Epstein’s world.”
But on Monday night, Watters obliged the demands of a powerful person with myriad, longstanding ties to the disgraced financier: Trump. The sole discussion of the Epstein story on his broadcast came during a segment in which his producer interviewed beachgoers.
Watters’ prime-time colleagues Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld likewise completely ignored the Epstein story on their Monday broadcasts. In the 7 p.m. slot, Laura Ingraham offered the following take: “As conservative influencers were eating their own about Epstein, the president was stealing the show on the one-year anniversary of the day he almost lost his life.”
In general, MAGA commentators have either gone silent like Fox News or are publicly championing the Trump line.
The silence from Watters and Hannity is particularly embarrassing because earlier this year both had claimed that members of the so-called “deep state” aimed to keep the Epstein documents from Bondi so she couldn’t expose them. The new narrative the president laid out on Sunday — that the likes of former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a slew of supposed deep state officials “created” the so-called Epstein files in order to undermine the MAGA movement — contradicts the hosts’ story.
Outside the Fox News portion of the MAGA ecosystem, there’s been somewhat more debate about the Justice Department memo. Some MAGA influencers pointed out the absurdity of Trump’s new narrative. “Barack Obama wrote the Epstein files? LOL. This is outright embarrassing,” commented Candace Owens on X. Benny Johnson, responding on a livestream Sunday, mentioned Trump’s theory and remarked, “What?”
Others were even more critical, at times even implicating Trump himself. “Either Pam Bondi is royally screwed up … or there is something there and it’s being covered up and the president blessed it,” said Megyn Kelly, a member of the diaspora of former Fox News hosts who now compete for its audience. Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh said, “There just is no option that allows you to just, you know, vindicate the Trump administration entirely.” But those cases seem like the exceptions — in general, MAGA commentators have either gone silent like Fox News or are publicly championing the Trump line. “Is it time to move on from the Jeffrey Epstein case?” asked podcaster Dinesh D’Souza. “I want to argue the answer is yes.” “I’m going to just have to defer to President Trump on this thing,” Newsmax’s Greg Kelly offered. “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being,” Kirk said Monday. “I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration” (though on Tuesday, Kirk claimed, “When I said ‘for the time being,’ I was talking yesterday”). Cracks keep forming in the coalition that united around a shared hatred of the left and put Trump in office. Those fractures will almost certainly continue as his administration’s actions anger its various factions, and they may even come to threaten Trump’s cultlike hold over the MAGA movement and the largely sycophantic right-wing media. But we’re not there yet.
Matt Gertz
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections. 
