The Great Disappointment

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

 

“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat once warned.

 

Douthat tweeted that nine days after the South Carolina Republican primary of 2016. Weeks before, Trump had lost evangelical-heavy Iowa to Ted Cruz and then prevailed in evangelical-light New Hampshire. South Carolina was an acid test for his candidacy, conservatives surmised. A dissolute nationalist from New York City had no chance at the GOP nomination if he couldn’t win in the Bible Belt.

 

Trump did win there, though, and comfortably. Douthat recognized the moral implications almost instantly.

 

But “post-religious” was the wrong term. The Trump-era right is post-Christian, but emphatically not post-religious. On the contrary, the most interesting thing about the MAGA movement is that it’s a fledgling religious faith growing in not-always-hospitable political soil.

 

It’s led by an infallible prophet (PBUH) who’s convinced he was saved by God to restore the kingdom. His disciples have subordinated all of their beliefs to his holy will. He implores followers to despise the infidel and presents himself as the only answer to their suffering. He’s been martyred repeatedly by his enemies, only to be resurrected each time. He offers a simple catechism: All problems are caused by a malevolent Them and can be solved with enough righteous “strength,” i.e. ruthlessness.

 

The tricky part for devotees is that political expediency sometimes—or often—leads the prophet to undermine his own teachings. He curses “forever wars” in the Middle East, then bombs Iran. He preaches the virtues of tariffs, then suspends them. He rejoices at mass deportation, then cancels the policy and un-cancels it—and may soon cancel it again. He praises lower spending, creates a new department to make cuts, then erases all of the savings generated many times over.

 

Many of his disciples don’t know or don’t care enough about policy to have these reversals shake their faith in his holy will. But when the prophet appears to be in league with the malevolent Them by excusing their most malevolent behavior, that’s a theological crisis in the making. If Donald Trump is the way, the truth, and the life, why are his high priests now claiming that the ruling class isn’t populated by Satanic pedophiles?

 

Where does MAGA go after the Great Disappointment?

 

Judgment Day.

 

The Great Disappointment is a term associated with the Millerites, a 19th-century sect whose leader insisted that Christ would soon return. That’s standard for cults—except that the Millerites, through elaborate biblical interpretation, became convinced that the Second Coming would happen on a particular date in 1844.

 

Rarely do so-called prophets get that specific, and no wonder. The day came and went, Jesus failed to show, and the sect crumbled. The Great Disappointment, the rapture that wasn’t, shattered the faith.

 

There’s a whiff of the Great Disappointment to the feral populists being told by Donald Trump’s Justice Department that Jeffrey Epstein did indeed commit suicide and that there’s no evidence that he maintained a “client list” implicating every rich and powerful person you’ve ever heard of.

 

Granted, Trumpism is based on more than exposing the truth about one mega-rich pedophile’s depravity. Whereas you couldn’t be a Millerite without having Judgment Day circled on your calendar, you can certainly be MAGA without caring much about Epstein. But if belief in an Epstein conspiracy is merely one small part of populism, it’s an important part. It bolsters the moral case for ruthlessness toward the country’s elite.

 

Populists don’t claim that the so-called “establishment” is foolish or misguided, as one might of a traditional political opponent. They claim that it’s evil, and the touchstone of evil in contemporary American culture is preying sexually upon children. You don’t rid yourself of evil by dutifully outpolling it every four years on Election Day; you purge it ruthlessly, with any weapon at hand. MAGA is a revolutionary movement, and all revolutions aim to permanently dismantle the regime they’re seeking to unseat, not to temporarily gain state power over it.

 

Epstein’s client list was the moral pillar on which those authoritarian pretensions rested. If Trump won, the thousands of predators who supposedly populate our elite institutions would be exposed, discredited, arrested, and imprisoned. The many moral compromises Trumpists have made over the past 10 years on behalf of their leader and the movement he inspired would be vindicated. It would be a sort of political Judgment Day, with the wicked cast into the lake of fire and the virtuous left to inherit the Earth.

 

Now here’s the prophet, speaking through his DOJ, to say there will be no Judgment Day. Disappointments don’t get much greater than that.

 

Frankly, one could argue that it’s unfair to the Millerites to compare them to Trumpists. Many of them did reexamine their beliefs and leave the faith when Christ didn’t descend in 1844, but no MAGA devotee of whom I’m aware has piped up in the past 48 hours to question their own beliefs about America’s supposed pedo-cracy. Many prominent Republicans, some at the highest levels of government, have demanded the truth about the Epstein “client list” and Trump himself promised during last year’s campaign to produce it. Yet now that we’ve been told it doesn’t exist, they haven’t made a peep.

 

Of the two cults, it appears that Trumpists are the stronger one. Which isn’t altogether good news for the future of the movement.

 

A crisis of faith.

 

It’s easy for soulless populist panderers like J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz to shrug at the Epstein news, either because they never believed in the client list or didn’t much care whether it existed. What they believe in is power. When paying lip service to MAGA beliefs about Jeffrey Epstein promised to gain them power, they did that. Now that hastily dropping the subject to serve Trump’s political interests promises to preserve their power, they’ll do that too.

 

Most Trumpists aren’t that cynical, though. They had faith that Judgment Day was coming. Now that it isn’t, they have two options. One is to abandon their faith, as the Millerites did—but where would they go? To the (gasp) Democrats? To right-wing populists, that’s less like leaving one Christian sect for another than leaving Christianity for Satanism. It’s one thing to revisit your beliefs in an Epstein client list, it’s another to switch your allegiance to those with whom you suspected of being on the client list.

 

Which leaves the other option, reconciling the Great Disappointment with the tenets of Trumpism. Call it a crisis of theodicy: Why would a God who’s good and just, who sent us Donald Trump to save us from our national sins, restore Trump to power but then allow the elite sexual-predator class to go unpunished?

 

No wonder Alex Jones is in tears.

 

One way to resolve that crisis is to speculate that the “deep state” destroyed the files before the president and his team could access them. That will become the default explanation for true believers, I suspect, because it’s the one that maintains most of their priors. Trump is good, the client list is real, and the evil establishment is forever one step ahead in covering up its crimes. The truth is, and will remain, out there.

 

Another possibility is to revise MAGA beliefs about just how sinister and all-powerful the dreaded “establishment” is. “There is a chain of command on this planet,” Mike Cernovich tweeted ominously after the Epstein news broke, “and elite pedophiles are at the very top. Even above Trump. Way above him.” That thinking is heretical in that it suggests the president is not our national savior, but the most demagogic and smooth-brained populists will like it because of how it implicitly condones more extreme ruthlessness towards enemies. If electing Donald Trump isn’t enough to stop “elite pedophiles,” well, then more radical measures might logically need to be taken.

 

A third way to resolve the crisis is to look for scapegoats. The prophet, being infallible, can’t be blamed for failing to expose Epstein’s co-conspirators. But his deputies sure can.

 

The obvious target is Attorney General Pam Bondi, who’s spent months bumbling her way through the grassroots clamor for the client list. Bondi tried to placate populists by inviting a number of “influencers” to the White House in February and handing them binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” which turned out to be a whole lotta nothing. Surely Phase 2 would be juicier, an expectation raised by the AG herself when she claimed on Fox News that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review” and later apparently alleged that “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn” were involved.

 

But in May the DOJ began to retreat. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, now Nos. 1 and 2 at the FBI, went on Fox Business to gently break it to the MAGA faithful that Epstein really did die by suicide. The idea behind their appearance, presumably, was that populists would take the news better if two of their most trusted Trump appointees delivered it, but it didn’t shake out that way. The memo that leaked this past weekend to Axios amounted to the Justice Department finally throwing in the towel: They had nothing juicy on Epstein and would no longer go on pretending.

 

Bondi would be a logical lightning rod for populist rage after getting MAGA’s hopes up and stringing them along, even if scapegoating the president’s deputies when he disappoints populists wasn’t already second nature by now. But insofar as she’s being accused of masterminding a cover-up of the evidence against Epstein, then that too is a heresy. She answers to Trump, after all. If she’s protecting a cabal of powerful kiddie-touchers, then either the president has consented to it (major heresy) or he’s feebly oblivious to his own attorney general being co-opted by the “elites” (minor heresy).

 

Either way, as long as populists continue to believe that the client list exists and that the DOJ has it, they’re accusing Trump of some greater or lesser degree of complicity in its suppression. And his movement will reckon with that once he’s gone.

 

Schism.

 

I suspect that populists will cope with the Great Disappointment the same way they’re likely to cope with all disappointments in Trump’s second term, by rallying around the prophet now and delaying the inevitable bitter clashes over their differences once he’s gone.

 

For instance, the debate over bombing Iran isn’t much of a debate right now, but check back in 2028. Republican doves would be risking clout, money, and future leadership opportunities on the right by antagonizing the head of the faith at this moment over his decision to attack, but Trump won’t be the head forever. When he departs, he’ll leave a power vacuum atop a major American political party greater than any since Franklin Roosevelt. Doves and hawks will seek to fill that vacuum by battling viciously over which is the true heir to his legacy (“What Would Donald Trump Do?”), a sort of Republican version of Sunnis and Shiites.

 

The Epstein saga will contribute to a schism among populist-nationalists too.

 

Last week, columnist Richard Hanania distinguished longstanding Trumpists from latecomers like Joe Rogan, who’s been complaining lately about federal raids on nonviolent illegal immigrant workers. “Rogan is a conspiracy theorist, so feels at home with the MAGA coalition,” Hanania observed, “but lacks their sadism, so he occasionally breaks with them on a topic like immigration.” Cranks and sadists are uncharitable ways to describe differences among populists, but not entirely useless ones.

 

Those are likely to be key fault lines in the 2028 Republican primary. Some candidates will lean hard into sadism to try to gain traction quickly among voters; others, concerned with their electability in a general election, will calibrate more carefully. We need an Alligator Alcatraz in every state, the “serious” candidates will say. Wrong—we need an Alligator Alcatraz in every state and we need to add piranhas to the water, the “firebrands” will answer.

 

Conspiracy theories will work the same way. Trump administration veterans like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio will likely fall back dismissively on the “deep state destroyed the Epstein files” theory I mentioned earlier, but hungry populist opponents won’t stand for it. Suppressing the Epstein client list was Donald Trump’s only real failure as president, some Tucker Carlson type will say. We know now that unless we have a nominee who’s even more uncompromising than Trump was, the secrets that our government is keeping will never come out.

 

The Great Disappointment will become a touchstone for how conspiratorial one thinks the GOP’s priorities should be once the Trump era ends and the party considers a more substantive populism. Where you stand on the urgency of exposing the child-abusing lizard people who supposedly rule us will inform whether you’re more disposed toward a Rubio or a Carlson, more mainline or Wahhabist in your faith. “Reform or fundamentalist?” is a question that troubles every religion. Why should Trumpism be different?

 

Even before then, I expect the Epstein letdown will be used opportunistically by right-wingers with policy axes to grind against Trump.

 

It’s already begun. “What the heck was the point of DOGE if [Trump’s] just going to increase the debt by $5 trillion??” Elon Musk asked on Sunday. A day later, he taunted MAGA fans by posting “The Official Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Arrest Counter” at all zeroes. Tucker Carlson has followed the same path, rebounding from his upset over the airstrikes on Iran by wondering sarcastically why he ever maligned poor ol’ Jeffrey Epstein now that Pam Bondi has given him a clean-ish bill of legal health.

 

Elon can’t get populists to care about spending and Tucker can’t get them to care about Iran. But they can stoke populist antagonism toward the Trump administration by grinding salt in the wound of the Great Disappointment.

 

Fundamentalist MAGA is coming. It might not prevail in 2028, but it will be among the options offered to the faithful. At this point, would any of us bet very much against it?